
Book i-W (a 

Copyright N?_ 

COPYRIGHT DSPOSfT. 



I 



GREAT LEADERS SERIES 

Edited by E. HERSHEY SNEATH, PhD., LL.D. 

YALE UNIVERSITY 



THE HEROES 
OF EARLY ISRAEL 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK ■ BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



THE HEROES 
OF EARLY ISRAEL 



BY 

IRVING F. WOOD, Ph.D., D.D. 

Professor of Biblical Literature and Comparative 
Religion, Smith College 



I2eto gotk 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1920 

AU rights reserved 



^ 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, July, 1920 



©CI.A576591 

olIP 24 1920 



"v» 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 

The " Great Leaders Series " aims to meet the 
needs of moral and religious secondary education. 
Adolescence is pre-eminently the period of Idealism. 
The naive obedience to authority characteristic of 
childhood is to a large extent supplanted at this time 
by self-initiative; — by self-determination in accord- 
ance with ideals adopted or framed by the individual 
himself. Furthermore, the ideals of this period are 
concete rather than abstract. They are embodied in 
individual lives, and, generally, in lives of action. 
Hence biographies of great leaders appeal strongly 
to the adolescent. They furnish examples and stim- 
ulus for conduct along the higher lines. The 
11 Great Leaders Series " will include a large number 
of volumes devoted to the study of some of the 
greatest moral and spiritual leaders of the race. Al- 
though designed primarily for use in the class-room, 
they will serve admirably the purposes of a general 
course of reading in biography for youth. 

E. Hershey Sneath. 



PREFACE 

This book is written primarily for use in schools, 
but the writer hopes that it may be found of interest 
outside the class-room. The early biblical narra- 
tives took their form as stories told in ancient Israel. 
To attempt to retell them for the people of to-day 
is only a return to their original use. 

In trying to interpret these tales the writer has 
kept in mind three principles: I. The old tales 
ought to be made as vivid as possible. Too often the 
archaic biblical English, dignified though it be, serves 
as a screen to obscure the reality of the story, espe- 
cially to young people. When the tale has been 
made real to the reader then he should be sent to 
the Bible to read the story there. It would be a 
rash writer who would set his version in place of 
the splendid simplicity of the English Bible. In this 
book every statement in dialogue or narration is in- 
tended to reproduce the Hebrew text or its implica- 
tions. II. The geography of Palestine and Egypt 
and the facts of history amid which the stories move 
ought to be made very clear. More than most great 
stories of the world, the tales of ancient Israel rest 
for their vividness upon their environment of land 
and people. III. It is necessary to recognize that 
two or more versions of some of the stories are in- 
terwoven in the biblical narratives. To ignore this 



PREFACE 

is often to involve the tale in hopeless confusion, 
sometimes in contradiction. This is the problem of 
sources, about which something is said in Chapter II. 
Teachers should know more about it than is con- 
tained in those brief statements. Bible Diction- 
aries and Encyclopedias discuss it in articles on the 
Pentateuch, Joshua and Judges. The present writer 
has tried to put it briefly in a book for college 
students, " The Bible as Literature," New York, 
19 14. All readers of these stories should recognize 
that they were told differently at various times and in 
various parts of the country and that their present 
form is often combined from two or more of these 
versions. The recognition of popular story telling 
in the early biblical books will forestall the greater 
part of the difficulties about the Bible which young 
people are almost certain to meet. 

The passages at the end of the chapters are those 
upon which the chapters are based. If possible, 
readings in them should be assigned as a part of the 
lesson, with such topics, suggestions and questions as 
may best fit the need of the class. To gain the 
power of intelligent reading of the English Bible 
should be one of the objects of the course. 

I wish to acknowledge obligations to Professor E. 
Hershey Sneath, the editor of this series, and to 
Professors H. T. Fowler and G. A. Dahl for sug- 
gestions of general plan, to Miss Eva M. Porter, of 
the Capen School, to Mr. John Dallas, of the Taft 
School, and to Mr. T. R. Hyde, of the Hill School, 
for helpful criticism of the book from the teacher's 
point of view, to the Forbes Library and to Miss. 



PREFACE 

Clara Bodman of Northampton, Mass., for the use 
of illustrations, and to my daughters for assistance 
in the preparation of the manuscript and in proof 
reading. 

I. F. W. 
Northampton, Mass., July 19 19. 



CHAPTER 

I 

II 

III 

IV 

V 

VI 

VII 

VIII 

IX 

X 

XI 

XII 

XIII 

XIV 

XV 

XVI 
XVII 

XVIII 
XIX 

XX 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Land of the Hebrews .... i 

Abraham the Emigrant 9 

Abraham in Palestine I .... 18 

Abraham in Palestine II . . . .25 

Isaac the Unambitious 31 

Jacob the Selfish Schemer .... 38 

Jacob in the School of Life ... 44 

Joseph Sold into Egypt 51 

Joseph the Premier of Egypt . . .57 

Joseph and His Family 63 

Egypt 71 

Moses in Training 78 

Moses the Deliverer 85 

At the Red Sea ....... 93 

The First Stage of the Wilderness 
Journey 101 

The Covenant of Jehovah . . . .110 

The Second Stage of the Wilderness 
Journey 118 

In the Camp at Kadesh 126 

The Third Stage of the Wilderness 
Journey 133 

The Last Days of Moses . . . .141 



CHAPTER 

XXI 

XXII 

XXIII 

XXIV 

XXV 

XXVI 

XXVII 

XXVIII 

XXIX 

XXX 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Joshua the Warrior I4 8 

The War of Conquest 156 

The Last Days of Joshua . . . .162 

The Migration of Dan 170 

Ehud and Deborah 177 

Gideon, Reformer and Warrior . .185 
Abimelech and Jephthah . . . .193 

Samson 200 

Stories of the Beginning .... 207 
A Review 215 



MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 



Relief Map of Palestine Facing I 

Map of the Old Testament World 13 

A Shepherd in Southern Palestine .... Facing 31 
The Hills of Gilead; The Brook Jabbok . . u 48 

Near the Banks of the Nile " 71 

The Mountains of Sinai " 101 

A Shepherd Camp East of the Jordan ... M 136 

The Plain of the Jordan " 152 

The Road from Jericho to Ai " 157 

Map of the Divisions of Palestine Between the Tribes . 163 
The Plain of Esdraelon Facing 188 



In the lower part of the map the wide plains broken by valleys 
are the northern part of the Wilderness where the Hebrews lived 
after the exodus. Beersheba and Hebron lie where the sharp ridges 
begin to appear, in the middle of the map. The wide plain at the 
west is Philistia. East of it lie the hills of Judea; east of these, 
the deep valley of the Dead Sea; east of that, the hills of Moab. 
Jerusalem lies on the top of the Judean hills west of the head of 
the Dead Sea. Jericho was in the Jordan Valley north of the 
Dead Sea. The long, narrow valley farther north, coming down 
to the Jordan from the east, is the Jabbok, and the country through 
which it flows is Gilead. West of the Jordan at this point are the 
hills of Ephraim, where Joshua lived. The high point projecting 
into the Mediterranean is Mount Carmel. East of Carmel is the 
Plain of Esdraelon, the scene of Gideon's conquest. Northeast, near 
the head of the Jordan, is the Lake of Gennessaret, or Sea of Gali- 
lee; farther north, the small Lake Huleh. North of that lay Dan, 
on the slope of the highest peak in Palestine, Mt. Hermon. The 
mountain ranges in the extreme north are Lebanon, the western, and 
Anti-Lebanon, the eastern. Damascus lies in the northeast corner 
of the map. 








■ \ 



Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 
A Relief Map of Palestine Showing the Mediterranean to the 
Left, the Hills and Valleys of Palestine in the centre and the Deep 
Jordan Valley and Dead Sea on the Right. 



THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

CHAPTER I 

THE LAND OF THE HEBREWS 

The land of the Hebrews has two names, Palestine 
and Canaan. Palestine was the Greek name. It 
originally meant Philistia, the plains on the southern 
coast, then later it came to be used for the whole 
land. Canaan is the usual name in the Old Testa- 
ment. It also meant at first only the low country 
along the coast but was extended very early to mean 
all the land. The names usually mean the country 
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean 
Sea, but sometimes they include the land east of the 
Jordan which was also part of the home of the 
Hebrews. 

Palestine is a very small country. In round 
numbers, Palestine can be said to be 150 miles long. 
Compare some distances in western countries; the 
railroad distance from New York to Albany is 143 
miles; Philadelphia to Washington, 135 miles; Mont- 
real to Quebec, 173 miles; Boston to Pittsfield, 151 
miles; St. Paul to Duluth, 156 miles; it is about 
half the distance from Chicago to Cincinnati or from 
end to end of Scotland. The breadth at Beersheba 
is about 90 miles; not quite as far as from Albany 



2 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

to Utica, from New York to Philadelphia, or from 
Cleveland to Erie. At Jerusalem it is 55 miles 
wide; about the distance from Boston to Portsmouth, 
from New York to Bridgeport, or from Cincinnati 
to Dayton. It narrows gradually, till in the extreme 
north it is only 25 miles wide. These measurements 
are from the Mediterranean to the Jordan Valley. 
The whole width of the country inhabited by the 
Hebrews would add twenty or thirty miles on the 
other side of the Jordan. The area of the country 
is about 6000 square miles. That is smaller than 
Wales, or about half the size of Holland; one-fourth 
smaller than Massachusetts, or one-third smaller 
than Vermont. Palestine could be put into the 
state of New York nearly eight times; into Illinois 
over nine times; into California thirty-six times, 
and into Texas nearly forty-four times. 

It is a land of mountains. From all parts of the 
land, except the seacoast of the extreme south, the 
Hebrew could say literally, " I will lift up mine eyes 
unto the hills. " Where the mountains are not too 
steep, limestone makes long slopes and rounded out- 
lines; but since it is usually soft and easily cut by 
water, the steep descents are often carved into deep 
ravines, high precipices and strange and fantastic 
rock forms. In general, the scenery is less rugged 
and the rocks less jagged than in a granite region. 

The Palestine hills are now bare. The rains of 
long years have often washed off the earth and 
great patches of yellow limestone rock are every- 
where visible. On the central ridge the fields are 
often narrow terraces, built up with stone to hold a 



THE LAND OF THE HEBREWS 3 

little soil on which to grow a few vines or a half 
bushel of wheat. In the spring the wild flowers do 
their best to spot the stony hillsides with color, but 
later in the summer the country looks parched and 
gray. In the times of the early Hebrews there were 
forests on some of the hills of central Palestine, but 
even then most of the country west of the Jordan 
was pasture land which dried up in the heat of 
summer and made the springs in the valleys the most 
precious possessions of the people. 

If you should ride east from Jaffa on the seacoast 
up to Jerusalem and down to Jericho in the Jordan 
Valley, you would cross the four great divisions of 
the country. 

( 1 ) The coast plain, level and sandy, gradually 
rising as one goes nearer the hills. The part near 
the hills is especially rich and fertile, and in the early 
summer is covered with fields of waving grain. In 
the south it is 16 miles wide and gradually narrows 
till, half way up the coast, it is only a few rods 
wide about the foot of a projecting spur, Mount 
Carmel. Then it widens again and is again nar- 
rowed by the hills of Galilee. On the southern plain 
and the lower hills behind it the Philistines lived. 
It is often called in the Bible Philistia. This plain 
has the same relation to the sea and the hills as the 
coast plain along the Atlantic from New Jersey 
south. 

(2) The hill country. This divides in the south 
of Palestine into two parts: (a) the foothills, long, 
rounded ridges, here broken by valleys through which 
the streams find outlet. This was a rich farming 



4 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

land, full of towns and villages. Toward the north 
this section becomes narrower. It corresponds to 
the Piedmont region of foothills along the Appa- 
lachian range, west of the Atlantic coast plain. 

(b) The central ridge, a plateau cut into valleys 
by the action of the winter streams. It is the south- 
ern extension of the Lebanon Mountains. This is 
the roof of the land. From every height one looks 
dowm deep valleys to the east or the west, and be- 
yond the Jordan can be seen the mountains of Gilead 
or, farther south over the Dead Sea, the high sharp 
edge of the plain of Moab. The range is about as 
high as the Berkshire Hills, the Catskills, or the 
Alleghenies in Pennsylvania. Jerusalem, w T hich fairly 
represents the average height in that region, is 
2500 feet above sea level. North and south of 
Jerusalem summits rise to over 3000 feet. Near 
Hebron, 20 miles south, is a height of 3500 feet, 
beyond which the mountains gradually sink into a 
half desert plain. To the north this mountain land 
stretches through Palestine, with one break at the 
Plain of Esdraelon. On this central range were the 
most important towns; Nazareth, Shechem, Samaria, 
Bethel, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron. On this 
ridge lived most of the heroes of Hebrew story — 
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joshua, Gideon, David and 
all the kings, Isaiah and most of the prophets. 

(3) The Jordan Valley. The eastern side of 
the central ridge drops off in deep, precipitous val- 
leys to the bottom of a great gorge, the deepest 
valley on earth. It w r as made by what geologists 
call a fault.. On each side the rock was pushed up, 



THE LAND OF THE HEBREWS 5 

leaving this huge valley between like a great ditch, 
reaching from the eastern arm of the Red Sea, be- 
tween the Lebanon and the anti-Lebanon, into 
northern Syria, a distance of 350 miles. It is 1300 
feet below sea level at the shore of the Dead Sea, 
while under the northern end of that sea is a great 
cuplike depression, 1300 feet deeper still, or 2600 
feet below sea level; about as much below as Jerus- 
alem is above sea level. Once this valley con- 
tained a lake 200 miles long, reaching from the Sea 
of Galilee to fifty miles south of the Dead Sea. The 
Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are the remnants of 
that old lake. 

The river Jordan rises on the mountains in the 
north and comes tumbling down into a marshy val- 
ley, then it flows through a little lake four miles long 
called in the Old Testament The Waters of Merom, 
now Lake Huleh. Here it is already only seven 
feet above sea level. After two miles of placid 
course it goes roaring and foaming over the rocks of 
a narrow ravine for nine miles to the Sea of Galilee, 
or Lake of Gennesaret. This lake is 680 feet below 
sea level, twelve and a half miles long and eight 
miles wide, and the hills come close to it all about 
except at the northern end. 

Then comes the great gorge of the Jordan Valley. 
It is 65 miles from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead 
Sea, eight miles less than the distance from New 
York to Poughkeepsie, but the river winds about so 
much that its actual course is nearly 200 miles, almost 
as far as from New York to Lake George. Most 
of the way it runs very rapidly and becomes muddy 



6 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

with sediment before it reaches the Dead Sea. The 
valley varies in width from four miles just below the 
Sea of Galilee to fourteen miles, above the Dead Sea. 
The Jordan floods its banks in the spring and the 
flooded land is covered with a jungle of trees and 
bushes, so that from the heights above the course of 
the river is a ribbon of green. 

The Dead Sea is forty-seven miles long and ten 
wide. On the east a gigantic wall of rock rises, 
broken by a few deep and narrow valleys. On the 
west the hills are more broken, but quite as barren. 
In this parched wilderness the water of the lake lies 
sparkling in the sun, as limpid and beautiful as any 
lake in the world. But so heavy is it with salts that 
no fish can live in it and a swimmer can sit in the 
water as in a chair. It has no outlet. In this 
narrow, hot valley all the water which enters evap- 
orates, leaving the salts brought from the hills to 
make the water continually more dense. 

Below the Dead Sea the valley rises very grad- 
ually, making a stretch of barren, heated desert, 
called the Arabah, between the southern part of 
Palestine and the highland to the East. 

(4) East of the Jordan Valley lies another ridge 
of high land. The northern part was called 
Bashan, the middle, Gilead, and the southern, Moab. 
At the extreme northern end is Mt. Hermon, 9200 
feet high, its top covered with snow except for a few 
weeks during the summer. It is the great mountain 
of Palestine, looming so far above the others that it 
can be seen from the heights even as far south as the 



THE LAND OF THE HEBREWS 7 

hills above Jericho. Bashan and Moab are largely 
plains, lying about as high as the hills on the west 
of the Jordan, but Gilead, between the two, is a land 
of hills and valleys, of running brooks and wooded 
hillsides. 

Palestine lies between 33^ and 31 degrees north. 
On the Atlantic coast this is from Charleston, South 
Carolina, to a little north of Florida. The great 
variations of elevation in Palestine give it a very 
unusual variety of climate. At Joppa, on the coast, 
oranges grow luxuriantly. At Jerusalem snow fre- 
quently falls in the winter, while the deep Jordan 
valley is as hot as almost any part of the tropics. 
This variation of climate makes possible a great 
variety of vegetation. On the hills of Gilead are 
firs and oaks and in the Jordan Valley are date palms. 
The fruits of the temperate zone and of the semi- 
tropics grow almost side by side. The country pro- 
duces olives, figs, pomegranates, mulberries, apples, 
dates, — to mention only some of the fruits known to 
the Hebrews of Bible times. 

Palestine lay on the road between the two great 
nations of the ancient world, Babylon and Egypt. 
The direct route between them would have lain 
south of Palestine, but that way was blocked by a 
wide desert, and the road usually used kept to the 
north, not far from the coast, then across the plain 
of Esdraelon, over the Jordan and north by way 
of Damascus to the Euphrates and then down that 
river to Babylon. Even on this road there was much 
desert; Palestine was the largest fertile region along 



8 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

the way. It was this fertility which first drew the 
Hebrews themselves to Palestine. They came as 
shepherd tribes seeking pasture for their flocks. 

Another road came up from the south to Hebron 
and passed on along the top of the central ridge to 
Jerusalem, Bethel, Shechem, then through the hills 
of Galilee and across the Jordan north of the Sea of 
Galilee to Damascus. Another road from Damas- 
cus passed east of Gilead and Moab, to Elath at the 
head of the eastern arm of the Red Sea. Over 
these roads traders carried the goods of distant 
lands, and farmers brought wheat and shepherds 
wool to the bazaars of the towns. The roads were 
only tracks over hills and deserts with camping places 
at the brooks or springs, but the same trails had been 
followed for generations. 



CHAPTER II 

ABRAHAM THE EMIGRANT 

" He went out, not knowing whither he went." 

How the Hebrew Stories Came to Us 

It was evening on the Judean hills. A group of 
shepherds had brought their sheep to the fold, eaten 
their simple supper, and were gathered about the fire 
to talk for a little while before wrapping their cloaks 
about them and lying down to sleep. Some of the 
shepherds were scarcely more than boys, and some 
were gray-haired men with grizzled beards. The 
boys gathered about one of the older men. " Tell 
us a story," they urged. " Tell us of the old days 
when Abraham lived here at Hebron." Now the 
old man was a famous story-teller, and nothing loath 
he told them the tale he had heard from his father 
when he was a boy, of how Abraham once, long ago, 
fed his sheep on these very hills and camped under 
the old tree not far away, and at last was buried in 
a piece of land he had bought from the owners in 
the market at the city gate of Hebron. And all the 
shepherds listened, though some of them had heard 
the tale many times before, for the old man told it 
so vividly that they seemed to see the ancient patri- 
arch at the door of his tent, and to hear his voice as 
he bargained for the land. When he finished the 

9 



io THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

shepherd said, " So God was guiding Abraham that 
he might give us this land of promise." 

What this old shepherd did that evening others did 
before him and after him, generation after genera- 
tion, repeating the old stories about what had hap- 
pened at Hebron. At other places in Palestine 
stories were also told by the old people. The stories 
were told in the villages when the day's work was 
over, in the camps of soldiers on the march, by 
mothers to the little children, by old men famed for 
their skill in story-telling. At the shrines the priests 
had old tales about why the spot was sacred. Some 
of the stories explained the names of places — why 
one place was called " The Well of the Oath " and 
another " The House of God " and another " The 
Cluster." Some explained the customs of the 
people, as why they never ate a certain part of the 
thigh in meat. But mostly they were tales about 
the ancient heroes of the nation, and the days when 
the Hebrew ancestors first came to Palestine, or when 
they went to Egypt, or how they were led back to 
Palestine in wonderful ways by their God. Of 
course the same story was told a little differently in 
different places, and each locality had its favorite 
group of local stories, but they all gathered about 
certain great characters of the olden time — Abra- 
ham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua and the 
warriors called the Judges. 

In the early days of the kingdom, in the time of 
David and Solomon, a group of men known as 
prophets rose to prominence. They were very earn- 
est about the worship of the national God, Jehovah. 



ABRAHAM THE EMIGRANT n 

They demanded that the rulers should do justly and 
that the rich should not oppress the poor. They re- 
minded the people that Jehovah had given them this 
good land of theirs and that he demanded their wor- 
ship, and he would surely punish the wicked and re- 
ward the good. Now these popular stories of the 
olden time furnished excellent illustrations of the 
very things the prophets wished to teach, so in time 
they too turned story-tellers. They gathered up 
these old tales and wrote them out, to teach the 
lessons they were trying to impress on the people. 

One collection of stories was made by an unknown 
prophet of Judah, probably within a century of the 
time of Solomon. Some of the finest, most vivid 
narrations of the Bible belong to this collection, 
which is often called the early Judean prophetic his- 
tory. Soon after, a prophet of northern Israel 
gathered the tales which were told in that part of the 
country. Some of the tales were the same as in the 
Judean collection, but with more or less difference in 
the details. This collection is sometimes called the 
northern prophetic history. Both, being written by 
prophets, had the same point of view. They showed 
that sin brings suffering; that God guided the an- 
cestors of Israel until finally he brought them into 
Palestine; and that Israel ought still to serve and 
trust the God of their fathers. 

In 586 B. c. Israel was conquered by Babylon and 
the best part of the nation carried away captive to 
Babylonia. There a great interest in the priesthood 
developed, and at some time later a priest wrote 
out the traditions of the origins of worship as they 



12 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

had been told among the priests, along with the laws 
and the traditions about their origin. This is called 
the priestly history. An older book of laws already 
existed in Israel, now embodied in the book of 
Deuteronomy. 

Now came the last step in this history. Some one 
took the old collections of prophetic stories and the 
newer priestly collection of stories and laws and com- 
piled them into one, bringing in also the older law 
book called Deuteronomy. Men sometimes make a 
harmony of the gospels, weaving them together to 
form a connected life of Christ. This writer did 
exactly the same thing. He wove together the old 
collections into a history of early Israel up to the 
time when they were settled in Palestine, showing 
how God had guided the origin and growth of the 
nation. This work comes to us as the first six books 
of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Joshua. 

The story of Israel began in a land far off from 
Palestine. On the wide plains of Mesopotamia be- 
tween the Tigris and the Euphrates was a town 
called Haran. It meant, in the language of Babylon, 
" the Road." Caravan routes centered there, com- 
ing up from the land of ancient civilization, Baby- 
lonia, and from thence scattering north and east 
and west. Here the Hebrew story placed the home 
of the first Hebrew emigrants. Indeed, the late 
priestly form of the story carries the home of the 
first Hebrews still farther back, to a Babylonian 
city, Ur, five hundred and sixty miles down the 
Euphrates. Ur was a famous old town, one of 




13 



14 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

the great ancient cities of Babylonia. It was a 
center of civilization and a shrine of the moon-god 
Sin. This god was also worshiped in Haran, 
and it has been surmised that Haran was a colony 
from Ur. It is very probable that the family 
ultimately came, along with other emigrants, from 
Babylonia and had settled in Haran with its caravan- 
saries and bazaars. 

In this town, then, lived Abraham, the ancestor 
of the Hebrews, and his brothers, Nahor and Haran. 
Their father Terah died in Haran; so did the 
brother Haran, leaving a son, Lot, who came, after 
the Oriental fashion, under the protection of his 
uncle Abraham. He was all the more welcome be- 
cause Abraham and his wife Sarah had no children. 

Abraham was the sheik, or head, of a household 
that made almost a tribe. These shepherds had 
flocks and herds and their tents were set up, now 
here and now there, on the plains. To Haran they 
took the wool of their sheep, and from Haran they 
brought the cloth for their clothes and the black 
camel's hair goods for their tents and the clay pots 
for cooking, and sometimes dates from the palms of 
Babylon and other luxuries from foreign lands. 
The land about Haran was fertile and well watered. 
It was crowded with people and flocks. Perhaps 
pasturage for the growing flocks of Abraham and his 
nephew was scarce. They resolved to migrate to 
new lands. The story as it has come to us in the 
Book of Genesis was written by men who were in- 
terested in showing how God had led the ancestors 



ABRAHAM THE EMIGRANT 15 

of the Hebrew people. They ascribed the migration 
of Abraham, as they did many other things, to God's 
direct command. God said to Abraham, u Get thee 
out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from 
thy father's house, unto the land that I will show 
thee." In these old Hebrew stories we need not 
stumble over tales of God talking with men. 
Modern writers mean the same when they say that 
God sent the Pilgrims across the wintry sea to found 
New England. God guides men; that is a belief 
very widespread and expressed in many ways. 

The great plains between the Euphrates and Pal- 
estine were the home of shepherd tribes. Caravan 
routes passed over them, and where the routes 
crossed or where they forded the rivers or where a 
stream made a specially fertile place, towns had 
grown up. Even in the north rivers were few, and 
much of the land furnished only scanty pasturage. 
Farther south the country became desert, and the 
few tribes fought for the possession of the rare oases. 
The caravans must make long journeys from one 
watering place to another over sandy stretches of 
inhospitable desert. Through this northern land 
came Abraham and his tribe, but they made no settle- 
ment. As he went toward the south the desert 
gradually closed in from the east. On the west 
were the high ridges of the Lebanon, well watered 
but rugged, perhaps already fully occupied with a 
settled people, in whose narrow valleys there was no 
room for the great flocks of nomad shepherds. 
Southwest lay the lower hills and more open valleys 



1 6 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

of Canaan, and here they sought a home for them- 
selves and pasture for their flocks. 

Abraham was a great man, who dealt on equal 
terms with the chiefs of the land. His camp con- 
tained shepherds, herdsmen, household servants and 
slaves. His wife, whose name was Sarah, " The 
Princess," had her own attendants. His nephew, 
Lot, with his wife and children and dependents, was 
also in the camp. Lot was rich in his own right, and 
his flocks added to those of Abraham formed an 
embarrassment of riches among the somewhat con- 
stricted pasture lands of central Palestine. At last 
the great camp pitched their tents at a place, She- 
chem, where a wide upland valley forms the best pass 
through the central ridge of Palestinian hills south 
of the Plain of Esdraelon. Springs make the valley 
fertile, and even thus early a town may have existed 
at the camping ground on the height of the pass. A 
rich plain near by awaited the flocks of shepherds. 
A terebinth tree was later known as a tree of divina- 
tion, and here, tradition said, Abraham encamped, 
and built an altar. Under this sacred tree, by the 
altar, came another message from God; " Unto thy 
seed will I give this land." 

The rich plains below Shechem were not the 
permanent abode of this emigrant tribe. Such terri- 
tories are taken early, and later comers must fight 
if they would gain them; so again the tents were 
struck and the slow caravans moved south across the 
plains and up the slopes to the highest point on the 
limestone ridge which forms the backbone of Pales- 
tine. Here, where the bare rocks show among the 



ABRAHAM THE EMIGRANT 17 

scanty herbage, where every height looks down upon 
lower lands to the east or the west, the homeless 
emigrants found a temporary resting place near 
Bethel. 

Genesis 11:27-12:9, Abraham's migration to Canaan. 



CHAPTER III 

ABRAHAM IN PALESTINE I 

The Journeys of the Shepherd Chief 

Those who told the story of Abraham did not aim 
to write a biography. They told a series of stories 
about this ancient hero, some of which were con- 
nected with the places in which he is said to have 
lived, and some of which preserved remembrances 
of his character. The result of the whole is a series 
of memoirs rather than a biography. They are in- 
tended to make an impression of a great character 
rather than to give an accurate history of events. 
The order in which the journeys of Abraham are 
given is as follows: (i) a journey to Egypt 
(12:10), (2) a return to Bethel (13:3), (3) a 
migration to Hebron (13: 18), (4) a military ex- 
cursion to the far north, Hobah, west of Damascus 
(14: 15), (5) a migration from Hebron still farther 
south, to Beersheba (21:31), (6) back to Hebron, 
where he purchased a burying place, and where he 
and his wife Sarah were buried (23: 2, 25: 8-10). 
It is interesting that nearly all the stories of Abra- 
ham are connected with the extreme south of the 
land. The great events of Hebrew history took 
place, for the most part, between Jerusalem and the 
Galilean hills, but for that region only Bethel and 

18 



ABRAHAM IN PALESTINE I 19 

Shechem are connected with the traditions of Israel's 
greatest ancient hero. 

The writers here introduce a story which brings 
Abraham once more into contact with the great 
world of ancient civilization. A famine came, as 
famines have often done, upon the hills of Palestine. 
Now it was common knowledge throughout the East 
that Egypt, watered by the Nile, seldom suffered 
from famine, and Egyptian records show that she 
sometimes opened her eastern border lands to 
refugees from the lands beyond. It was a long, 
hard journey over half desert land to Egypt. There 
must have been long discussions about the camp fires 
before it was finally decided to roll up the black tents 
and drive the herds down the hillsides to begin the 
tedious journey to a strange land. Other nomadic 
tribes must have also moved along the same way, 
driven by the famine. They were admitted to Egypt 
and allowed to pasture their cattle till the famine 
was over. 

Here a most unexpected story is told, which could 
never have been considered in any way creditable to 
this ancient worthy. Knowing that officials of Egypt 
were eager to place beautiful women in the harem 
of the king, Abraham feared for his life. He 
asked his wife to consent to a lie, and say that she 
was his sister and not that she was his wife. The 
ruse succeeded; it came near succeeding too well, but 
God intervened and Abraham came out of this dis- 
reputable episode with more flocks and herds, more 
silver and gold, than he had before; for the king 
sent him away with gifts. Lying in the ancient east 



20 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

was not regarded as a serious fault, but to deny one's 
wife could never have been looked upon as anything 
but dastardly. A tradition ascribing such a deed to 
a national hero seems at first sight very strange. 
Probably it was told to show that God was so guid- 
ing the ancestors of the nation that even their sin 
and their folly were overruled for the furthering of 
his plan. It is curious that each of the three collec- 
tions of stories used by the writers of Genesis has 
preserved a tale of this sort; two about Abraham 
(12: 10-20, 20: 1-18) and one about Isaac (26: 6- 
11). The second story about Abraham and that 
about Isaac are laid in the south of Palestine and 
the name of the same king, Abimelech, appears in 
both. It is natural to suppose that these are three 
varying forms of one original story. 

Abraham's tribe included the family of Lot, 
Abraham's nephew, who also had wife and children, 
flocks and herds, servants and retainers. As their 
flocks grew it is not surprising that strife arose be- 
tween the herdsmen of Abraham and of Lot. The 
crest of the rocky ridge at Bethel is not wide and 
there were other tribes about with flocks of their 
own to pasture on the hillsides. At last the two 
relatives, who had traveled and camped together for 
years, agreed to separate. Abraham, the sheik of 
the tribe, might have dictated to the younger, Lot 
Instead, he gives a free choice. " If thou wilt take 
the left, I will go to the right : if thou wilt take the 
right, I will go to the left." Lot lifted up his eyes 
and looked; and they rested upon the one spot of 



ABRAHAM IN PALESTINE I 21 

rich fertility which can be seen from near Bethel, the 
valley of the lower Jordan. It seemed like a very 
garden of God, and Lot chose that. 

So he went down the steep valleys into the Jordan 
plains and Abraham still pastured his flocks on the 
stony hilltops. Before long, however, Abraham 
also left and migrated thirty miles farther south, to 
the broader fields near Hebron. Here later tradi- 
tion connected his camp with an aged sacred tree, as 
at Shechem, and with an altar for worship, as at 
Bethel. 

But Abraham did not forget his nephew who had 
chosen life in the Jordan plain. Kings from Elam 
and Shinar, the country of the Babylonian empire, 
made an invasion of the west. They conquered the 
tribes on the pastoral plateaus to the east of the 
Jordan Valley, raided far to the south, to El-Paran, 
the later Elath, at the head of the Red Sea, then 
came north and attacked the cities of the Jordan 
plain. In a whirlwind raid, such as the East has 
always been subject to, they captured and looted the 
towns, gathered the population as slaves and swept 
on to the north with their booty. Among the cap- 
tives were Lot and his family. The easier choice 
had brought disaster. Then Abraham became, for 
once in the story, a warrior. He gathered what 
force he could and started to rescue his nephew. 
He caught up with the invading army at Dan, in the 
extreme north of the later possessions of Israel, and 
chased them far out over the northern plains. Then 
the captives and their rescuers came back. 



22 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

But the disasters of Lot's choice of the easy life 
were not yet over. One day, as Abraham sat at his 
tent door in the heat of the day, he looked up and 
saw three men approaching. With the gracious 
courtesy of Arabian hospitality he ran to greet them 
and begged them to rest and eat a morsel of bread. 
Then he hastened his household and spread the best 
feast a shepherd camp could provide. The old tale 
has it that the three men were divine messengers, and 
that one of them was God himself. 

The meal was over, and the men took their leave 
along the road to the Jordan plain. Like the 
modern Bedouin host, Abraham walked with them a 
short distance. The whole tale presents Abraham 
as, from the point of view of Palestinian civilization, 
a high-minded and courteous gentleman. God him- 
self, it is not irreverent to say, thus judged him. He 
is represented as saying to himself, " Why should I 
hide my plans from Abraham? I know that he will 
rear his family in righteousness, so that they will 
become a great nation. " Then God tells him that 
the great wickedness of Sodom will bring upon it a 
merited destruction. The two divine companions go 
on and Abraham stands still before Jehovah. Then 
the great heart of the old shepherd chief pleads in 
pity, not merely for his nephew Lot, but for all the 
doomed city. " It may be there are still some right- 
eous in the city. Would not God in his mercy save 
it for fifty righteous ? M God said he would. " And 
for forty-five? " " Yes." " For forty? " " Yes." 
"For thirty? " " For twenty? " and each time God 



ABRAHAM IN PALESTINE I 23 

consents. " I will speak but once more. If only 
ten should be found there? " " I will not destroy 
it for ten's sake." 

The two messengers of God went on to the city, 
but only to find it hopelessly bad. Lot, who now 
dwelt in the city, was the only one among the 
churlish inhabitants who opened the door to them. 
Lot's guests hastened him and his family from the 
city. " Do not wait," they said. " Hurry to the 
hills. Do not even stay to look behind." On their 
heels came the swift storm of destruction, so close 
that when Lot's wife halted to see what was going 
on she was overcome. Later generations pointed to 
a pillar of rock salt, weathered into fantastic form, 
as Lot's wife. 

The next morning Abraham, anxious in his pity 
for the great population of the plain cities, went to 
the point where yesterday he had stood with the 
divine visitor and looked over the fair scene; but 
to-day the smoke rose from it like the smoke of a 
furnace. Meantime Lot, who chose the easy life in 
spite of its known temptations, was a homeless 
refugee, hiding in a cave in the hills. 

It would seem from this story that the Hebrews 
thought the cities which were destroyed lay beneath 
the surface of the Dead Sea. In fact, the Dead Sea 
is but the remnant of a much larger sea. Those who 
visited its barren shores, tasted its salt and nauseous 
waters and saw the bitumen along its shore, natur- 
ally concluded that this lake, so different from any 
other body of water they knew, must mark some 



24 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

great judgment of God. The story they told about 
it made a great moral lesson of sin and its punish- 
ment. 

Genesis 12: 10-20. Abraham in Egypt. Genesis 13: 1— 13, 
Lot's choice. Genesis 14: 1-24, Abraham a warrior. Gen- 
esis 18: 1-33, A divine visitor. Genesis 19: 1-28, The 
outcome of Lot's choice. 



CHAPTER IV 

ABRAHAM IN PALESTINE II 

How Abraham Became " The Friend of God " 

11 El Khalil," " The Friend;' is to this day the 
Moslem name of Hebron, near which Abraham lived 
so long. " El Khalil h they also call Abraham, 
more often than by his name. So James (2:23) 
says that Abraham was called the friend of God, and 
a Hebrew prophet (Is. 41 : 8) makes God speak to 
" Israel my servant — the seed of Abraham my 
friend." 

All through the stories of Abraham run a series of 
accounts of covenants which God made with him as 
with a friend. Before he started on his long journey 
from Haran God promised to make of him a great 
nation. At Shechem Jehovah said to him, " Unto 
thy seed will I give this land." After he and Lot 
had separated Jehovah said, " Look north, south, 
east and west. All the land that you see, to your 
seed will I give it." Still later, near Hebron, God 
made a definite covenant with Abraham. " I am 
childless," said Abraham. " You shall not be child- 
less," said God. " Count the stars of the heavens, 
if you can. So countless shall be your descendants." 
The story says that Abraham believed God, but still 
he asks, " How may I know? " He prepared a sac- 

25 



26 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

rifice for Jehovah; beasts and birds were divided and 
set in two portions over against each other, and he 
kept watch by them till darkness came down. Then 
he fell asleep watching the sacrifice and in his sleep 
there was a sense of awe, a terror of great darkness, 
and out of it God spoke, and once again promised 
this land to his descendants. 

Still another covenant with God is narrated, where 
again Abraham was promised a multitude of de- 
scendants and this land as their home (17: 1-21). 
Two things are connected with this tale ; ( 1 ) a 
change of name. In Genesis, up to this point, the 
hero's name was Abram and his wife's Sarai. Now 
they are changed to Abraham (" Father of a Multi- 
tude," the writer takes it to mean) and Sarah 
(Princess). (2) The account of the origin of cir- 
cumcision; a ceremony which, like baptism in the 
Christian Church, was regarded by the Hebrews as 
a consecration of the people to God. But it was 
more than that. This old tale made the ceremony 
a pledge that this land of Palestine should be theirs 
if they were faithful to God. 

Abraham was growing old and he had no children, 
yet he believed that God had promised the land to his 
descendants. At last two sons were born to him. 
One was the son of an inferior wife, the other, of 
Sarah, and was named Isaac (laughter) . A natural 
jealousy had sprung up in the household and the 
slave-wife, Hagar, was sent away with her son, 
Ishmael. They took refuge in the deserts to the 
south where the boy grew up and became a hunter. 
This story served to express the sense of relation- 



ABRAHAM IN PALESTINE II 27 

ship which Israel felt with the tribes dwelling to the 
south, in the deserts of North Arabia. Doubtless 
the tale which made their ancestress a cast-off slave 
of Abraham's household did not take its form among 
the Arabians. Later, however, the Moslem Arab- 
ians made much of the relationship, extended the 
descendants of Ishmael to include all Arabia, and 
prided themselves on being the children of Abraham. 

Meantime Abraham had moved once more from 
Hebron, going farther to the southeast and camping 
at Beersheba. To the south rose chalky downs 
through which the scant rains drained rapidly. In 
the spring the country was green with grass and rich 
with flowers but later it was a waterless, barren 
desert. He had reached the end of the land of Pal- 
estine. But his new home was not a wilderness. 
The chief of another shepherd tribe, Abimelech, was 
his neighbor, and their herdsmen quarreled over the 
use of the wells for watering their cattle. The 
chiefs settled the quarrel in a friendly alliance, such 
as the desert tribes still make with each other. 
Abraham planted a tree and dug a well and set 
aside a special flock of seven sheep to begin a herd 
in memory of the alliance. That, tradition said, 
was the origin of the name of the place — Beersheba, 
the well of the oath, — and of the ancient sacred tree 
which stood there. The place was always one of 
the national shrines of Israel. 

Through these peaceful years the boy Isaac was 
growing more precious to his father. Abraham be- 
lieved that God had promised the perpetuation of 
the tribal blood and power through this son. Then, 



28 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

as the story says, God tested Abraham. He told 
him to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was a com- 
mon thing in the very ancient world. It was a part 
of the Hebrew heritage from their Semitic ancestors. 
In the ruins of Gezer, in Palestine, explorers have 
found that the foundations of some of the houses in 
the time before the Hebrews were laid over the bones 
of slaughtered children. In early Israel itself there 
was at least one case of human sacrifice, Jephthah's 
daughter. 

This custom, repulsive as it is to the civilized 
world, was a natural issue of sincere religion in primi- 
tive times. God ought to have a gift worthy of 
him. The greater a god is conceived to be, the more 
valuable should be the gifts presented to him. The 
most valued possession of the ancient family was 
children. When children were thought of, not as 
individuals with the right to life, but as the posses- 
sions of their parents, it is inevitable that a vigorous 
religion should often think of God as demanding the 
sacrifice of a child. If the first born of the lambs 
was to be given to God, why not the first born child? 
Could a man refuse this sacrifice simply because it 
was more precious and still pretend to care supremely 
for his God? 

The prophets of Jehovah in Israel, who were 
geniuses in their clear insight of what was right and 
wrong, vigorously protested against the barbarism 
of human sacrifice. One of the means they took was 
to retell this old story about Abraham. It seemed 
to him that God demanded of him the supreme sacri- 
fice. Who was he that he should refuse? Early 



ABRAHAM IN PALESTINE II 29 

in the morning he arose, cut wood for a sacrifice, 
took two young men and his son Isaac and set off 
for the Mount of the Revelation of God (Moriah). 
Nothing in the story locates this mountain. A late 
tradition arose that it was the hill in Jerusalem upon 
which the temple was afterwards built by Solomon; 
but on or close to this site the town of Jerusalem 
seems to have already stood. On the third day 
they came within sight of the hilltop Abraham 
sought. He left the servants with his ass and said, 
" My son and I will go yonder and worship." Isaac 
carried the wood and Abraham the fire and the sac- 
rificial knife. Isaac asked, " Father, where is the 
lamb for the sacrifice?" and Abraham answered, 
11 God will provide the lamb, my son"; and they 
went on together. So they toiled up toward the hill- 
top; and what thoughts were in the mind of the 
agonized father we can imagine better than describe. 

The test was carried to the end. Abraham built 
the altar, laid the wood in order, bound his son and 
laid him upon the wood and lifted his knife to strike, 
when, the story says, God stayed his hand, and a 
ram, caught in the thicket, furnished a substitute for 
the boy. 

The tale was intended to fix in Hebrew thought 
the idea that God did not demand human sacrifice. 
So in Hebrew law the firstborn of the flocks were to 
be sacrificed, but the firstborn child was to be re- 
deemed by the payment of money or by some 
offering. 

Later, Abraham moved his camp back to Hebron. 
Here Sarah died. Now, for the first time in all his 



30 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

life of wandering, the aged chieftain felt that he 
must have some land which he could call his own. 
He needed it as a burial place for his wife. In 
the Oriental way, the bargaining went on at the gate 
of the town. " Anything we have is yours," was the 
form of courtesy which one still hears in the east. 
11 No," said the old chief, " but I will buy my land." 
11 I give you the land you want," was the answer. 
11 No; set a price for it," — and the bargaining goes 
through its regular forms of stilted courtesy. At 
last a price is named. " Four hundred shekels of 
silver — but what is that between you and me?" 
The silver is weighed, and for the first time in his 
life the aged shepherd owns in fee simple a plot of 
land in the territory that God had over and again 
promised to his descendants. 

In his old age Abraham's thoughts turned to the 
home of his youth, and he sent back his trusted ser- 
vant to arrange a marriage for his son Isaac. Then 
he died, and his sons buried him beside his wife in 
the cave that was in the plot of ground he had bought 
for a burial place. 

The story of his life is the simple tale of an 
eastern shepherd, but it pictures a man courtly in 
manner, gentle in spirit, noble and courageous in 
action, faithful to ideals and unselfishly devoted to 
the highest conceptions he could attain. 

Genesis 13:14-17, 15:1-18, 17:1-8, 22:15-19, Cov- 
enants with Abraham. Genesis 21:1-21, Hagar in the 
Wilderness, Genesis 22: 1-14, The call to sacrifice Isaac. 




Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 
A Shepherd Among the Hills in Southern Palestine 



CHAPTER V 

ISAAC THE UNAMBITIOUS 
Traditions of a Negative Character 

Isaac is a character who moves so passively 
through Hebrew story that almost no traditions 
are preserved about him alone. He plays a sec- 
ondary part in the tales of his noble father or of his 
clever sons. The lone son of his parent's old age, 
the petted heir of the shepherd camp, he was per- 
haps so sheltered and guarded that the real strength 
of his character had no opportunity to develop. 
That Isaac could meet a terrible test without flinch- 
ing was shown when his father laid him on the altar 
to face death. 

Isaac was not a pathbreaker. His boyhood had 
been spent upon the broad hillsides and wide downs 
about Hebron, Beersheba, and Gerar. In his man- 
hood he never left that familiar countryside. It was 
easier to pasture the herds his father had left him on 
these open spaces than to seek new ranges. Why, 
indeed, should he move on? To the south the vege- 
tation thinned out rapidly into a gravelly desert. 
To the north the more fertile slopes were already 
occupied, so that his father, hardy pioneer as he 
was, had retreated from the land. The stories 
mention the Philistines, stronger tribes with better 

31 



32 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

weapons and a higher culture, as already upon the 
only attractive land near by, the coast plains of the 
Mediterranean to the northwest. To the east lay 
the bare desert of the Dead Sea region, and the high 
plateaus of pasture land beyond were held by tribes 
who would not welcome strangers. By far the 
easiest course was to stay where he was. He even 
entered upon agriculture, an occupation which the 
true Bedouin shepherd of Arabia despises, because 
it attaches a man to a single spot. Nevertheless 
the new occupation prospered. The wandering shep- 
herd tribe was becoming a rich farming community. 
They had reached the stage, still held by some of 
the tribes in that same region, of semi-nomads. 
That is, their wanderings were limited to well estab- 
lished ranges and they cultivated more or less land 
in connection with their shepherding of flocks. Yet 
they did not become wholly settled. The accounts 
locate the camp sometimes at Hebron, sometimes at 
Beersheba, sometimes at Gerar; but Hebron and 
Gerar are not more than twenty-five miles from 
Beersheba. 

The longest account of a single episode in the 
history of the ancient heroes of Israel is the story 
of the marriage of Isaac. When Abraham was 
very old he called his oldest and most faithful ser- 
vant, who had charge of all his household, Eliezer. 
He said, " Swear to me that you will not take a wife 
for Isaac from among the tribes about us. Go 
back to my native country and my kindred and bring 
him a wife from there." But the cautious old ser- 
vant said, " Suppose no woman will come so far 



ISAAC THE UNAMBITIOUS 33 

away from her home. Shall Isaac go back there? M 
" No," said the father. " God brought me from my 
old home here. He will find a wife for my son. 
But in any case, Isaac is to stay here, in the land 
God has promised my descendants. " The aged chief 
was shrewd enough to know that the older and richer 
land from which he came might bring too strong 
temptations for the boy reared in shepherd tents on 
the edge of the desert. 

Then the servant took ten camels and all sorts 
of precious gifts and started on the long journey. 
One afternoon he came, in the land between the 
rivers Euphrates and Tigris, to the city where 
Nahor, the brother of Abraham, had lived. It 
w r as almost time for the women of the city to come 
out at sunset to get the night's supply of water, 
and he made his camels kneel down by the well. 
Then he prayed to his master's God to give him a 
sign by which he might pick the chosen maiden; 
and since the old servant was as shrewd as his 
master, he set a sign that would indicate a generous 
and active character. He would ask a drink of some 
maiden and if she not only gave him a drink but 
went beyond the needs of courtesy and offered to 
draw water for his camels also, might God grant 
that she should be the one for Isaac's wife. Cer- 
tainly such a maiden would be neither churlish nor 
lazy. 

At that very moment a maiden, very beautiful, 
came from the city with her water jar on her 
shoulder. She filled the jar at the well and started 
back. Then the old servant applied his test. He 



34 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

ran to her and said, " Let me have a little drink." 
It was a request a dusty traveler might make of any 
woman at the well. " Drink, master," she said, 
and took the jar from her shoulder for him. Then 
when he had drunk she went beyond the needs of 
courtesy, just as the old servant had set for his test, 
and said, " I will draw water for your camels too." 
She emptied the water in the trough and ran for 
more, till all the thirsty camels were satisfied; and 
Eliezer, well pleased, watched her intently. Then 
he took out a gold ring and two gold bracelets, and 
said, " Whose daughter are you? Is there room in 
your father's house for us to-night?" She said, 
" My father is Bethuel and my grandfather, Nahor. 
We have room and food for you." And the old 
servant said, " Now God be thanked, who has sent 
me to Abraham's own family." 

The girl took the jewels and ran home and told 
how the man who gave them was waiting for word 
about the lodging. Then her brother ran out and 
said, " Come in; " so they went in, and the house- 
hold made busy preparing for the unexpected guests. 
Who these were they had not stopped to inquire, but 
the rich gifts showed them to be persons of note. 
Soon food was ready for the men, but Eliezer re- 
fused to eat before he had told his story of the 
wealth and prosperity of Abraham, the purpose of 
his present journey, the test he had applied to Re- 
bekah, and his hope that God had guided him to the 
right wife for his master's son. When they heard 
of the test and its outcome they said, " We have 
nothing to say; God has already decided." The 



ISAAC THE UNAMBITIOUS 35 

servant brought out jewels of silver and gold and 
rich garments and precious gifts for the bride and 
her family, and then they feasted and slept. The 
next morning the servant proposed to hasten back 
but her father and brothers said, " Not yet. Let us 
keep the maiden at least a few days." But the ser- 
vant was urgent, Rebekah was willing to go, and 
they hastened off. The family sang a song of bless- 
ing as she mounted the camels and rode away: 

" By thousands of thousands may your seed be told, 
And the gates of their foes may they always hold." 

Some days later Isaac was wandering quietly in 
the fields at sunset when he saw camels approaching. 
From one of them a woman alighted and, after a 
few words with the caravan leader, veiled herself 
and came toward him. She was his wife from the 
old country, and he installed her in the tent where 
his mother had lived and loved her and trusted her. 

Rebekah was a fitting wife for Isaac. He was 
quiet, retiring, unassuming. She was active, vigor- 
ous, decisive, full of spirit and fire. She may have 
been a hard mistress to a lazy servant, but she was a 
loyal wife to her husband and a good manager of the 
tangled affairs of the tribal encampment, and she 
won the affection and trust of her husband. 

There were many points of interest for the He- 
brews in this story. It was a tale of adventure 
and romance which connected this little land in 
which they lived with the distant home from 
which their fathers came. It was a tale about 
their ancestors and told how rich and honored 



36 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

they had been. It presented typical kinds of 
admirable character; Abraham, the wise and pru- 
dent head of a family, thoughtful for the next 
generation; Eliezer, the faithful household ser- 
vant, loyal to the interest of his master and the 
worship of his master's God; Isaac, the obedient son 
and loving husband; Rebekah, the careful, thrifty, 
vigorous wife, the efficient head of an Oriental 
household. 

Only a few other traditions gather about the 
name of Isaac. There is a story of a famine, but 
Isaac did not, like Abraham the traveler, go to 
Egypt. He sought food in the near-by territory of 
Abimelech; and there was a tradition, which seems 
a duplicate of that about Abraham, that he, too, 
tried to pass off his beautiful wife as his sister lest 
his life should be endangered on her account. When 
the people of the land became jealous of his growing 
wealth and began a course of petty annoyances, 
claiming the ownership of wells which Isaac's herds- 
men had dug, he retired and dug another. They 
claimed that also, and once more he peacefully re- 
tired and dug another. This well was so far to the 
south that he was left alone and he said with relief, 
" Now God has given us room," and settled down. 
His friendliness had its reward, for the chief 
Abimelech came to him and proposed a treaty of 
peace. It so chanced that the same day Isaac's 
servants came and reported they had found water in 
a new well they were digging. Isaac made the well 
a memorial of the covenant with Abimelech, and 
named it Beersheba, the well of the Oath. In the 



ISAAC THE UNAMBITIOUS 37 

story of Abraham there is also an account of the 
naming of Beersheba, where it is likewise " The 
Well of the Oath," to commemorate the alliance of 
Abraham with a chief named Abimelech. 

The close of Isaac's life was clouded by the strife 
of his sons and the favoritism and deceit of his wife. 
Both sons were obliged, as we shall see later, to leave 
their father's camp. The stories imply a lonely old 
age; but this was due, not to his own character, but 
to that of those around him. 

Genesis 24, The journey of Abraham's servant. Genesis 
26: 12-33, Isaac and the neighboring chiefs. 



CHAPTER VI 

JACOB THE SELFISH SCHEMER 

How Trouble Arose in a Disunited Home 

The stories of Jacob give a good illustration of 
how the old tales changed national history into per- 
sonal tradition. The stories of Jacob are so human, 
so true to life, that it is very probable they tell the 
adventures of a great leader of some of the ancestors 
of Israel. At the same time the later groupings of 
the tribes which made up the nation of Israel are 
plainly symbolized by the accounts of the family of 
Jacob. The powerful tribes in the center of Israel, 
Benjamin and the two Joseph tribes Manassah and 
Ephraim, are said to have descended from Jacob's 
favorite wife; two groups, one south (Reuben, 
Simeon, Levi and Judah), and the other north 
(Issachar and Zebulun), from his less favored wife; 
while four outlying tribes containing much Canaanite 
blood and never very important or very closely 
bound to the nation, are said to be descendants of 
slave wives; and in all cases the names of the tribes 
are given as the personal names of sons of Jacob. 
There was nothing unusual in this. The same form 
was used to express the relationship of Arabian 
tribes, even where the connection was one of alliance 
rather than of blood. Tribal history was often ex- 

38 



JACOB THE SELFISH SCHEMER 39 

pressed by personal stories. At the time when these 
stories were first put into written form, perhaps 
shortly after the time of kings David and Solomon, 
all this national history was forgotten. Those who 
gathered these popular tales did not stop to question 
how much was tribal and how much personal. 

Two sons, twins, Jacob and Esau, grew up to- 
gether in the tents of Isaac, so the story went, but 
they were as different as possible from each other. 
Jacob was cool, calculating, prudent and not very 
scrupulous about how he gained his ends. Esau 
was hasty, impulsive, careless about the future. 
Jacob stayed by the tents, watching the herds and 
satisfied to come home every night to a good supper 
and comfortable bed. Esau wanted wild adventure. 
He loved hunting and was content to go hungry and 
to sleep on the lee side of a rock in the desert for 
the excitement of the chase and the solitary freedom 
of the wilderness where he could do as he pleased. 

Things never went smoothly between the boys. 
They probably had no patience with each other, and 
whenever Esau took his bow and went over the hills 
to hunt in the desert they were both relieved. Soon 
the antagonism flamed out in a way which had per- 
manent results. Esau came in one day from the 
hunt, hot and tired and hungry. Jacob was busy 
over the fire cooking a dish of lentils for supper, and 
the steaming food smelled good. " Give me some 
of that food," said Esau, impatiently. " Yes," said 
Jacob, coolly, " I'll give it — for your birthright? " 
' You can have the birthright," said Esau. " What 
is it worth when a man is half dead with hunger? " 



4 o THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

It was a bad bargain for the boy. A birthright in 
the East was a serious matter. It meant headship 
of the family and a double portion of the inheritance. 
To care nothing for it showed, not merely that one 
was improvident and shortsighted for his own in- 
terest, but that he ignored the dignity and responsi- 
bility of family obligations. 

The hearty, impetuous, wayward Esau was his 
father's favorite. The old chieftain had lost his 
sight so that he could not see to tell one son from 
the other but he knew them by their voices or the 
feel of their hands. One day he called Esau and 
said, " I am not long for this world. I want to give 
you my blessing, my son, before I die. Go and 
bring game and cook it for me and I will give you 
my blessing." Esau was glad, for the blessing of 
an old man brought good fortune. But Rebekah, 
busy in the tent, had heard what Isaac said, and 
began to scheme how she might get the blessing for 
her favorite son, Jacob; for Jacob's scheming nature 
was inherited from his mother. She called Jacob 
secretly, cooked meat as Isaac loved it, put Esau's 
clothes on Jacob and sent the boy in to get his father's 
blessing by a lie. The father lifted up his head as 
he heard the steps. " Who are you?" " Esau, 
your oldest," said Jacob. " Come so soon?" 
Isaac asked in surprise. " Yes. God gave me 
good success," said Jacob. But the old man thought 
he detected Jacob's voice. " Are you really Esau? " 
he asked. " I am," was the reply. " Then bring 
me the food and I will eat it and bless you." So he 
ate and drank and blessed his son. A formal bless- 



JACOB THE SELFISH SCHEMER 41 

ing or curse was held to have a magical power which, 
once it was uttered, not the will of gods or men could 
stay. It was fitting that the blessing should be in 
verse. 

" Peoples shall serve thee, 

Races shall bow to thee. 

Blessed are those who bless thee, 

Cursed are those who curse thee." 

No sooner had Jacob gone than Esau came in with 
the dish of game from his hunting. " Come and 
eat of my food and bless me/' he said eagerly. 
11 Who are you? " exclaimed the old man. " Esau/' 
was the answer, with the voice that left no doubt in 
his father's mind. Shaken with emotion the blind 
old man cried, " Who was it then brought me food 
and I ate it and gave the blessing to him, and I can- 
not take it back? " For once Esau's indifference to 
the future vanished, and he cried with a loud and bit- 
ter cry, " Bless me, even me also, O my father"; 
but it was of no use. Isaac had given his greatest 
blessing, and not even he could withdraw it. Jacob 
must keep the supremacy. It is no wonder that Esau 
muttered threats. " Wait till my father's death, 
and then I will kill him," he said. The atmosphere 
of the camp was tense with open hatred after this. 

The threats soon came to Rebekah's ears. Esau, 
the impulsive, was taking this disaster harder than 
she had expected. She had overreached herself 
and had placed her favorite son in danger. She 
dared not keep Jacob near her. She called him and 
said, " Esau will kill you. You must go away to my 
brother Laban and stay a little while till I send 



42 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

word that it is safe for you to come back." One of 
the versions of the story made it still more dramatic. 
The first intrigue led to a second. Rebekah talked 
to Isaac about how desirable it would be if Jacob 
could find a wife from their own family, as his 
father had before him. Why not send Jacob back 
to her brother, who would look after his interests? 
The old man, knowing nothing of the real reason, 
consented to Jacob's going away. 

And so Jacob went, and the old mother was left 
with the husband and the son whom she had tricked; 
and as the stories were first told neither she nor Isaac 
ever saw him again. 1 

It is a great event for a boy to go away from home 
the first time. Jacob climbed up the hills all day 
long and at sunset was on the summit of the great 
central ridge of Palestine, at the place later called 
Bethel, close to one of his grandfather's old camp- 
ing places. The hilltop is a small limestone plateau 
strewn with loose bowlders. Here, on what must 
have seemed to his untraveled eyes the rooftree of 
the world, he watched the sunset over the lower hills 
to the west, and then lay down to sleep. The next 
morning he woke with the consciousness of a dream. 
The great white stones about had piled themselves 
into a giant staircase and up and down it had passed 
before his dazzled eyes messengers of God. The 
dream meant, so he interpreted it, that God had 
guided him to sleep on the first night of his journey 
in a sacred place. He was struck with an unaccus- 

1 Gen. 35: 28-29 belongs to the late priestly collection of stories and 
laws. 



JACOB THE SELFISH SCHEMER 43 

tomed sense of awe. u God is here," he said to him- 
self, " and I knew it not." He set up one of the 
stones as a memorial, but even in this reverential 
hour he could not lay aside the impulse to bargain. 
" If God will prosper me I will come here and 
worship when I come back." 

Just a dream, we say. So it was, but it was the 
beginning of manhood for him. Manhood never be- 
gins until one realizes that there is some great ideal 
above the life of work and play. 

Genesis 25 : 27-34, Jacob's bargain with Esau. Genesis 
27:1-45, Jacob's deceit of Isaac. Genesis 27:46-28:22, 
Jacob's journey. 



CHAPTER VII 

JACOB IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE 
The Transformation of a Selfish Character 

Jacob took up his journey over the mountains of 
Palestine in the light of the vision of God which he 
had seen at Bethel. At length he came upon the 
plain of Mesopotamia and one afternoon drew near 
a group of shepherds with their flocks resting by 
a well. u Where are you from?" he asked them. 
u Haran," they replied. Ah! That was the city 
of which his mother had so often told him. u Do 
you know Laban? " he asked. " We do," they said, 
11 and here comes his daughter Rachel to water her 
father's sheep." 

The beautiful shepherdess won the heart of her 
cousin, and the romance of Jacob began, like his 
mother's, with a chance meeting at a well. Over 
the mouth of this well was a great stone; for water 
on this wide plain is precious, and the shepherds took 
care that no one should draw more than his share. 
This custom was not familiar to Jacob, and he set 
his strength to the task and rolled away the stone 
and drew water for his cousin's flock. She hastened 
home to tell her father of the young stranger who 
said he was their kinsman, and Laban came running 
out to greet Rebekah's son. His greeting was as 

44 



JACOB IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE 45 

cordial as even his mother could have desired, and 
Jacob found a new home in Laban's household. 

Everything worked out as Rebekah had planned. 
If that shrewd old woman did not know about La- 
ban's daughters before she sent her son to him, she 
was less familiar with her own family than most 
Orientals. Laban was as shrewd as she. He saw 
to it that Jacob made himself useful with the flocks, 
and after a month he said, " There is no reason 
why you should work for nothing just because you 
are a relative. What pay do you want? " " I want 
Rachel," said Jacob. Now that was what Laban ex- 
pected him to say, but it never would do to be too 
eager. He seemed to consider. " It is better to 
give her to you than to send her out of the family," 
he said. So they agreed that he should serve seven 
years for his wife, and wait till the years were over 
before he married; and those seven years seemed 
only a few days because of the love he had for 
her. 

There was no trickery and nothing unusual 
about the bargain. But at the wedding Laban took 
the veiled bride to the groom, and it was not Rachel, 
but his oldest daughter, Leah. He protested with 
indignation to his father-in-law, but the smooth- 
tongued schemer said, " O, but one must follow the 
custom. It is the custom to marry off the oldest 
daughter first. Now, we can arrange this. After 
Leah's wedding festivities are over you can have 
Rachel too. Then you can serve seven years more 
for Rachel." There was nothing for Jacob to do 
but to consent, however grudgingly. 



46 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

The years of toil went on. When Jacob com- 
pleted his service for the bride-price he made a bar- 
gain for wages; and he had no scruples about tricking 
his father-in-law if he could. Laban changed his 
wages, and he changed his tricks to meet it. God 
helped him, he said, piously; and his share of the 
flocks kept growing suspiciously larger. The situa- 
tion grew strained, till at last Jacob took advantage 
of Laban's absence at a distant sheep-shearing to 
pack up his whole household and decamp. Rachel, 
to do what she could for her husband's future pros- 
perity, stole the images of the family gods and took 
them along without her husband's knowledge. 

The caravan hurried across the Euphrates and 
over the wide plains to the southwest. Seven days 
after their flight, when by rapid marches they had 
already reached the hills that looked toward the 
Jordan Valley, Laban caught up with the fugitives. 
It may have been sarcasm or it may have been 
chagrin which made him say that if Jacob had only 
been more open with his plans he might have come 
away with a cordial farewell; but, he added, why did 
Jacob steal his gods? Jacob protested with truth 
that he knew nothing of the theft of the gods, and 
offered to let Laban search for them. Rachel hid 
them so well that they were not found. Then the 
indignation of Jacob broke out, and he berated La- 
ban for the insult of the accusation of the theft, after 
twenty years of faithful, unselfish service and hard- 
ship in Laban's niggardly employment. 

Laban, still claiming affection for his daughters 
and their children, proposed a covenant, in which he 



JACOB IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE 4 7 

called God to be the avenger if Jacob mistreated his 
daughters. Like Jacob, Laban was a mixed 
character. He was capable of placing both his 
daughters in a position of lifelong trouble in order to 
get a servant's wage for a few years, but he could 
not bear to think that they might suffer from the 
action of others. Self-interest strove with fatherly 
love. He piled a cairn of stones and called it 
11 Galeed." In the earlier version of the story, with 
its primitive religious ideas, the heap itself was a sort 
of god who would watch between the rights of the 
two covenant parties. A later form of the story 
calls God to be the witness, and the heap of stones 
becomes a watchtower, Mizpah, the evidence of the 
covenant. " Jehovah watch between us," they said; 
which meant " God keep peace between us; nothing 
else can," and they bound themselves to stay each 
on his own side of the line marked by the cairn. 
This was the story told among the hills on the east 
of the Jordan about the origin of certain old stone 
memorials on the borders between Israel and the 
tribes of the East. 

As Jacob neared his old home the memory of the 
deeds of his youth came back to plague him. He 
was approaching Esau, the brother whom he had 
wronged. The impulsive Esau had lost his emnity 
long ago; but Jacob did not know it. He sent mes- 
sengers with friendly words, and they soon returned 
saying that Esau was coming with a force of four 
hundred men. Jacob was alarmed. He divided 
his caravan, putting his favorite wife and children 
in the second division. The next morning he sent 



48 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

ahead drove after drove from his flocks, and in- 
structed the herdsmen of each to say the same thing 
when they met his brother's force; " This is a pres- 
ent for my lord Esau." A succession of gifts might 
appease his anger for that trickery of long ago. 

Still Jacob did not feel safe. He woke his cara- 
van in the night and sent both divisions ahead, across 
the ravine of the Jabbok (the Struggler), the larg- 
est stream of the hill country beyond Jordan, while 
he himself stayed behind. He wanted to be alone 
and to pray. But in the darkness a man grappled 
him and they struggled together till the day began 
to dawn. At first Jacob took him for one of the 
bandits who infest the stony hills and rob solitary 
travelers, but after a time Jacob began to suspect 
that he was more than human, and he strained 
Jacob's thigh by merely touching it. Now all the 
ancient world believed in the magic of the name. 
If one knew the name of any being, god or man, he 
possessed power over him. " Tell me your name," 
said Jacob. " No," said his antagonist; but Jacob's 
persistence at last won, not, indeed, the name of 
his antagonist, but a blessing, and the change of 
Jacob's own name from " Supplanter " to " Strug- 
gler with God " (Israel). In the dawning light of 
the morning Jacob crossed the ravine, limping with 
his strained thigh but saying to himself, " I have 
seen God face to face, and yet I live." 

We see how crude the religious ideas of this 
strange tradition are. This is not an allegory of a 
spiritual struggle in a night of prayer. It is a story 




Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 
Looking East Among the Hills of Gilead. The Brook Jabbok 
Flows in the Bottom of the Vallev 



JACOB IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE 4 9 

of a real wrestling match, in which a man grappled 
with God until God wanted him to let go, and the 
man would not. The man demanded a blessing and 
obtained it. 

Those who put this old tale in the book of Gene- 
sis regarded it as marking the crisis of Jacob's life. 
His discipline was by no means over. Much sor- 
row still awaited him. But his nobler qualities had 
now triumphed over the baser. Loneliness, disap- 
pointment, hard work, and the love of his wife and 
little children had made the selfish, egotistical boy 
into an unselfish, noble-souled man. 

The Hebrews found the explanation of three dif- 
ferent things in the story; (i) that it was not the 
Hebrew custom to eat the sinew of the thigh in 
animals; (2) that their nation had two distinct 
names, Jacob and Israel; (3) that a place on the 
Jabbok bore the name " Face of God " (Peniel) . 

Jacob the cautious met his brother that day, as he 
rode up the Jordan Valley at the head of his four 
hundred men, with fear in his heart. But Esau 
remembered only the playmate of his boyhood. His 
impulsive nature was willing to let bygones be by- 
gones. They entered upon an oriental rivalry of 
courtesy, Esau shrinking from the rich gifts and 
Jacob urging them upon him. Esau proposed to 
go with his brother's caravan but Jacob, still a little 
suspicious, made excuses that his caravan, with its 
flocks and little children, could not travel as fast 
as Esau's unencumbered company. In the same 
spirit he declined the proffer of a guard, and the two 



So THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

brothers separated. Jacob is said to have settled 
for a time near his grandfather's old camping ground 
at Shechem, then to have gone to the region of his 
boyhood, the pasture lands of Beersheba. 

Genesis 29: 1-30, 31 : 1-55, Jacob and his relatives. Gen- 
esis 32, 33, Jacob and Esau. 



CHAPTER VIII 

JOSEPH SOLD INTO EGYPT 

The Education of a Spoiled Boy 

The story of Jacob now comes back to the old 
family home in southern Palestine. We can think 
of his camp as reproducing the scenes of the camps 
of his father and grandfather — a large group of 
black tents on the chalky downs, with slow moving 
flocks and herds guarded by shepherds who some- 
times led their cattle far afield in the search for 
pasturage. In one respect Jacob was richer than 
the former chiefs of his tribe. He had twelve sons, 
and that was considered far more important. Most 
of these were big, stalwart men, off with their 
father's sheep nearly all of the time. They were the 
sons of different wives and some bickering went on 
among them. Two boys, younger than the others, 
were the sons of Rachel. She was dead, and all the 
affection of the father was poured on her children. 
Of course it made jealousy in the motley household. 
The older of the two, Joseph, now aged seventeen, 
was his father's favorite, and a spoiled boy, as we 
might expect. His father got him what our Eng- 
lish Bible calls a coat of many colors, but what should 
be translated, a long tunic with sleeves. It was the 
sort of garment worn by nobles and wealthy idlers 

5i 



52 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

in the days when this story was told in Israel. 

Joseph began to tell tales on his brothers, which 
very likely they may have deserved. He began 
to dream about being superior to all the family, and 
having his father (the storyteller forgets that his 
mother is dead, and mentions her too) and his 
brothers all come and bow down to him, even though 
a younger son; and he had the lack of tact to tell 
his foolish dreams. Even his fond father lost 
patience at this, and his brothers began to hate him. 
Joseph was on the high road to becoming a selfish, 
lazy pleasure seeker, a trial to his father and a 
trouble to the whole family. He was redeemed 
from it by being roughly thrown out into the world. 

The story represents Jacob as still retaining pas- 
turage rights at Shechem, far to the north, in central 
Palestine. The ten older sons of Jacob had driven 
their flocks there and had been gone so long that 
their father wanted word from them. He sent 
Joseph, not to share in their labor, but to bring 
news about them. Joseph went w r illingly, but when 
he came to the fields near Shechem he found that 
his brothers had gone on down the hills a dozen 
miles farther, to Dothan, on the wide plain of Es- 
draelon. He followed them. As he approached, 
one of the men said with a sneer, " There comes the 
dreamer." On the spur of the moment a plot was 
formed to kill him and throw his body into a pit 
and say that beasts had devoured him; "Then," 
they said, " we will see what will become of his 
dreams." What followed seems to have been told 
in two different ways in different parts of the country. 



JOSEPH SOLD INTO EGYPT 53 

In central Israel, where the tribe of Reuben lived, the 
version was that Reuben, intending to save Joseph's 
life, proposed to put him in a dry cistern, but that in 
Reuben's absence, the boy was drawn out by a pass- 
ing caravan of Midianite traders, and Reuben sin- 
cerely mourned his loss. As it was told in the tribe 
of Judah it was Judah who saved his life. Touched 
with a crude sense of brotherhood, he proposed that 
they sell him into slavery to a caravan of Ishmaelites 
instead of killing him. The writer of Genesis com- 
bined the two accounts and made a unified story, 
except for the different names of the trading cara- 
van. They took him up from the cistern, stripped 
off his gorgeous long sleeved tunic, and sold him into 
slavery. How he protested, and how his brothers 
accounted for having a slave to sell, the story leaves 
to imagination. So the money was paid over — 
about twelve dollars, possibly a little cheap because 
the transaction was obviously shady — and the two 
gangs of scoundrels separated, the merchants march- 
ing off with their new bought slave down the coast- 
road toward Egypt. So the first chapter of Joseph's 
romantic life closed and the second opened. 

As to the brothers, one heartless thing led to 
another. They killed a kid and smeared the fine 
tunic with its blood. When they returned home with 
the flocks, they brought it to their father and said, 
11 We found this. It looks like Joseph's coat. See 
whether it is or not." Jacob said, " Yes, it is. 
Some wild beast must have killed him. Joseph is 
without doubt torn in pieces." The broken-hearted 
father mourned for his son as dead and refused to 



54 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

hear any words of comfort. " I shall go to my 
grave," he said, " bewailing my son." 

Meantime the traders, taking roads far to the 
west of the range of Jacob's herdsmen, followed the 
caravan route across the desert to Egypt. In the 
time of Joseph the route was already old and armies 
and embassies, traders and robbers, nobles and 
slaves, had for centuries trodden its sands and 
camped at its scant water-holes. 

Among the goods this caravan displayed in the 
bazaar of the city on the Nile which ended their 
journey was the young slave, Joseph. His early 
life in the open must have made him a fine, up-stand- 
ing, clear-cut youth. The traders soon sold him, 
doubtless at a good profit, to Potiphar, a high official 
of the court of Pharaoh. 

So here was another change in Joseph's fortunes. 
Now he, who probably never had slept under a heav- 
ier roof than a tentcloth, was thrown into the com- 
plexities of an extensive household in the center of 
an ancient and elaborate civilization. Besides the 
unfamiliarity of customs and manners, he had the dif- 
ficulty of a new language to cope with, for the 
Egyptian was a different tongue from his native Pal- 
estinian Semitic. 

Yet there were three things he had; an uncon- 
querable cheerfulness, a power of adaptation, and 
strict integrity. Cheerfulness was necessary to tide 
him over the terrible loneliness and win the help of 
other people with the new things he had to learn. 
Ready adaptation was necessary every hour of the 
day. Without it he could have been only a kitchen 



JOSEPH SOLD INTO EGYPT 55 

helper or a donkey driver, always awkward and 
uncouth in speech and manner. Strict integrity was 
most necessary of all if he was to be anything but a 
shifty timeserver. 

The story, like most Eastern stories, skips over 
what must have taken some years of toil and train- 
ing in faithful service, and only gives the result. 
Joseph became the trusted superintendent, the major- 
domo, of his master's household. 

All things considered, affairs were not going so 
badly with Joseph. A slave who, while still a young 
man, was manager of an important official's house- 
hold in the capital of Egypt might have a career by 
no means to be despised. Strange things sometimes 
happened in Oriental life. 

Then suddenly his world went to pieces again. 
His master's wife, attracted by the handsome youth, 
tempted him. He refused to betray his master's 
trust and to sin against God. She, enraged at being 
rebuffed by a slave, made false accusation against 
him, and he was disgraced and imprisoned because 
he would not do wrong. This was the supreme 
moral test of his life; but he could not have met it 
without the years of obscure training which lay be- 
hind. He was ready to throw away everything ex- 
ternal which he had gained rather than to do a 
wrong. 

If Joseph had sat down and moped in a corner of 
the prison, as many a slave would have done, that 
would have been the end of his story. His kindly 
helpfulness and unquenchable cheerfulness saved 
him. He began to make himself useful, and the 



5 6 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

head of the prison, finding this foreign slave trust- 
worthy and resourceful, made him the unofficial war- 
den of the prison. Once more Joseph had met a 
difficult situation and mastered it by the force of 
his character. There was no wonderful genius 
about it; just the qualities of cheerfulness, adapta- 
bility and integrity which any young man may culti- 
vate in himself. 

Genesis 37, Joseph sold as a slave. Genesis 39, Joseph, 
the slave in Egypt. 



CHAPTER IX 

JOSEPH THE PREMIER OF EGYPT 

How a Slave Became Commissioner of Food 
Conservation 

The next change in the life of Joseph was the 
most startling of all, but it came about through 
Joseph's simple kindliness of spirit. Two officers 
high in Pharaoh's court, who might be called the 
Lord High Butler and the Lord High Baker, had 
fallen into disgrace and been imprisoned. Oriental 
courts have always been noted for rapid changes of 
fortune. A man was often a prince one day and a 
pauper the next; and fortunate if he kept his head 
on his shoulders. 

One morning Joseph found them sad, and asked 
the reason. They had each dreamed a dream which 
they thought must have a meaning, but, being pris- 
oners, they could not summon an interpreter of 
dreams to tell them the meaning. 

" The interpretation of dreams comes from God," 
said the kindly warden, " tell me your dreams." 

The chief butler said that he had dreamed of a 
vine with three branches, bearing grapes, and he, 
restored to his old position, gave the wine from the 
grapes to Pharaoh. " The three branches are three 
days," said Joseph, " and in three days you will be 

57 



5 8 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

restored to your old position. Do not forget me 
when you come again into power." 

Then the chief baker told his dream gladly. It 
also was a dream of three; three baskets on his 
head, and in the upper basket all sorts of cakes for 
Pharaoh, but the birds were flying about and eating 
the cakes. His interpretation was not so happy. 
11 The three baskets are three days," said Joseph, 
11 and in three days you will be taken from prison 
and hung and your body given to the birds." 

According to the story, all this happened to the 
two prisoners. But when the chief butler was back 
in power again, he did not find it convenient to do 
anything for the Syrian slave in prison. The story 
is charitable, and says he forgot him. Perhaps so. 
People who have had a rise in the world do some- 
times succeed in forgetting their humble friends. 

Two years passed. They went quickly enough 
with the official in the court, but they must have 
dragged wearily with the slave, waiting in the prison 
for the action of his faithless friend. At last there 
arose a great commotion in court. Pharaoh him- 
self had dreamed a dream and had called the official 
interpreter of dreams to tell its meaning. A dream 
of the Pharaoh was important; and this particular 
dream was curiously double, and, what made it more 
important, was about the Nile, which was itself a 
god, and cows, which were sacred animals. 

There was great buzzing of gossip in the court, 
and all the courtiers knew that the Pharaoh had 
dreamed a dream which the magicians acknowledged 
they were unable to understand. The situation was 



JOSEPH THE PREMIER OF EGYPT 59 

serious. Then the chief butler went to the Pharaoh. 
He ventured to call up the past, even if at risk to 
himself, and plainly told the story of his dream in 
prison and of the Syrian slave who gave the right 
meaning. " Bring him here," said Pharaoh, and the 
court messengers hastened to bring the new magician. 
Soon, shaved and dressed as was fitting for court 
presentation, he was brought before the Pharaoh. 
11 I am told that when you hear a dream you can 
interpret it," said the Pharaoh. " Not I," was the 
reply. " God only can give Pharaoh a favorable 
answer." 

Then the dream was told by Pharaoh. Seven fat 
cows were feeding by the Nile, and seven lean cows, 
leaner than any ever seen in Egypt, ate up the fat 
cows, and still were as lean as ever. He awoke, then 
slept and dreamed again. Seven full, heavy ears of 
grain were eaten up by seven thin and shriveled ears. 

Joseph gave an interpretation. " God in his 
goodness has shown Pharaoh what he will do. Both 
dreams mean the same. Seven years of good crops 
will come, then seven years of famine. Let the gov- 
ernment take a policy of food conservation and lay 
aside a fifth of the crops in the years of plenty for 
the years of famine." 

The court saw the practical wisdom of the pro- 
posal, and Joseph was made " commissioner of food 
control." Pharaoh placed his signet in Joseph's 
hand. This gave him power to sign edicts with the 
Pharaoh's authority. He clothed him in royal gar- 
ments, hung a gold chain about his neck, made him 
ride in the second chariot, and sent couriers before 



60 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

him to summon the people to pay homage, and set 
him over all the land. How the story-tellers in the 
Hebrew villages reveled in these details of a 
splendor remote from their simple life! 

Joseph identified himself with his new surround- 
ings, took a high sounding Egyptian name, as was 
customary upon great promotions — Zaphenath- 
paneah, meaning, perhaps, " The God speaks and he 
lives " — and made a marriage appropriate to his 
new position, to the daughter of a priest at the 
neighboring shrine of On. 

At On there had been for centuries a famous tem- 
ple of the sun-god Re, and the city is better known in 
history by its Greek name Heliopolis, The City of 
the Sun. Its ruins stand on the edge of x the fertile 
country, west of the old capital Memphis. Here 
were huge inscribed obelisks set up to symbolize the 
rays of the sun. They are older than the time of 
Joseph. 

These great obelisks have had a curious history. 
More than a thousand years after Joseph's time, 
when the Romans ruled Egypt, Heliopolis fell into 
decay, and four of these obelisks were taken, with 
great labor, to adorn the city of Alexandria, on the 
coast of Egypt. Cleopatra's needles, they came to 
be called. Later one was taken to Constantinople, 
one to Rome, one, in 1877, to London, and at last, 
by the gift of the Egyptian government, one in 1881 
to New York, where it stands in Central Park, near 
the Metropolitan Museum. One of the great 
obelisks still stands in the ruins of Heliopolis, as it 



JOSEPH THE PREMIER OF EGYPT 61 

did when Joseph, according to the story, married the 
daughter of a priest of Re at the old shrine. 

Joseph's new position was not one of idleness. 
On the contrary, never had he been called on to 
work so hard. He was to buy all the grain he could 
for seven years and store it in the nearest cities, in 
great brick granaries like those pictured on Egyptian 
monuments; and between greedy dealers, grafting 
subordinates and the high officials of a court never 
famous for its honesty, Joseph's seven years' task 
was not an easy one. 

Then came the seven years of famine. Famine 
was common in many parts of the East, but very rare 
in Egypt. The fertility of that country depends 
upon the Nile, which rises each year and floods the 
low-lying land. It is these flooded lands which con- 
stitute the fertile soil of Egypt. Everything beyond 
is desert. When the Nile floods failed Egypt had 
a famine; but that has rarely happened. Usually, 
when droughts brought famine to surrounding lands, 
Egypt had the usual crops. The droughts which 
could affect Egypt were far to the south, in the 
region of the great lakes of central Africa and in 
Abyssinia, regions scarcely known to the Egyptians. 
In the twelfth and seventeenth dynasties, between 
two thousand and fifteen hundred years before Christ 
and in the eleventh and again in the twelfth centuries 
after Christ famines came; and the first, like that 
in the Joseph stories, lasted seven years. 

An Arabic historian, writing of the famine in the 
twelfth century after Christ gives a picture of what 



62 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

he saw. " The poor ate carrion, corpses, dogs. 
They even devoured little children. ... A traveler 
often passed through a large village without seeing a 
single living inhabitant. ... In one village, where 
there had been four hundred homes of weavers, the 
weavers lay within their houses dead, men, women 
and children." 

From the worst horrors of famine the people of 
Joseph's time were saved by the policy of food con- 
servation. When the famine began Joseph opened 
the granaries and sold food to all who came. Soon 
he had all the cash of the country in the royal 
treasury. When the money was gone he offered 
food in exchange for the cattle, and before the year 
was over all the cattle and sheep and horses and 
asses were the property of the government. Then 
the people sold their land, and at last themselves, for 
food to eat and, at the end, for seed to sow. The 
Egyptian peasantry thus became landless serfs of the 
crown, giving a fifth of the crops into the royal 
treasury. The priests, however, were supported by 
the government, so they did not have to sell their 
land. 

Palestine was a land of small farmers owning their 
own fields. The Hebrews had heard of the very 
different land system in Egypt and connected the be- 
ginning of that system with the tradition of Joseph. 
The land tenure in Egypt, they liked to believe, 
showed the great power which one of their own race 
once held in the ancient empire on the Nile. 

Genesis 40, Courtiers in prison. Genesis 41, The slave 
became the premier. 



CHAPTER X 

JOSEPH AND HIS FAMILY 
How a Great-Hearted Man Requited Good for Evil 

The drought far off to the south of Egypt, which 
had lowered the level of the Nile, had also spread to 
the lands east and west. The report went among 
the shepherds of Palestine that in Egypt there was 
food for sale. Jacob, now an old man, but still the 
vigorous head of his tribe, heard it, and when no one 
in the camps or towns in Palestine had food to sell, 
called his sons and sent them down to Egypt to buy 
grain. " All go except Benjamin," he said. " I 
cannot let him go. Some harm might happen to 
him." 

Benjamin was the younger brother of Joseph. 
They were the only sons of Jacob's beloved wife 
Rachel, and when Joseph had disappeared years ago 
the fond old man's affection had clung about Ben- 
jamin. The lad had openly been his father's fav- 
orite, but whether he was more tactful than Joseph 
or whether the older brothers had been sobered by 
the sad results of their jealousy, they harbored no 
hatred against Benjamin. 

The ten sons of Jacob, with what money they could 
spare from the family store in the tents, a train of 
asses, and servants to care for the caravan, started 

63 



64 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

down the coast road across the desert to Egypt. 
They must have thought often of how twenty years 
ago they sent their brother on the long journey down 
this same road, and must have wondered what had 
become of him. 

The uncouth shepherds may have been somewhat 
timid about entering the borders of Egypt, but things 
fell out worse than their greatest fears. There were 
fortresses on all the desert roads into Egypt, and no 
caravan got past without inspection. These men, 
who professed to be coming to buy grain, were al- 
lowed to come in but were taken before Joseph him- 
self as suspicious foreigners who should be investi- 
gated. This Egyptian prince was the greatest man 
they had ever seen, and they knelt, confused and 
overawed, and touched their foreheads to the ground 
before him. Joseph knew them; but he was too 
clever to put himself in their power and too kindly 
to take vengeance. What he did had two purposes: 
to find out about his father, and to test his brothers. 
If they proved to be as heartless and unscrupulous as 
they were twenty years before, he would have to deal 
with them differently from what he would otherwise. 
In any case they must not know who he was. This 
was not difficult. They may have looked curiously 
at the slaves who passed them bearing burdens in the 
street to see if one of them might not resemble 
Joseph, but they would never look for him under the 
robes of the premier of Egypt. 

These men being obviously Semites from some- 
where to the east of Egypt, the premier sent for his 
official interpreter to turn his Egyptian into the 



JOSEPH AND HIS FAMILY 65 

tongue of the barbarians, and began questioning the 
scared shepherds; but they needed no interpreter to 
translate his black looks and harsh tones. They be- 
gan to tell their story — how they had come from 
Canaan to buy food — but he interrupted them. 
11 You are spies, " he said, " come to find out the weak 
spots of the defenses, now that famine is on us." 
" No," they protested. " We have come to buy 
food. We are all brothers. We are honest men. 
We are not spies." " Spies you are," growled the 
obstinate official. The men were thoroughly scared. 
If their story was not believed, where would they be? 
They had nothing but their own word to offer, and, 
in the characteristic Eastern way, they began volubly 
to tell all about themselves and their family. This 
was exactly what Joseph wanted. He found out that 
his father was still living, that his younger brother 
was at home with his father, and that he, Joseph, 
was supposed to be dead. As for them, their scared 
faces revealed little except terror. They must be 
made to show their characters. 

An Eastern official with despotic power can be 
very stubborn on occasion. " Just as I said, you are 
spies," retorted Joseph. " Now I will prove it. By 
the life of Pharaoh, you do not go out of Egypt 
unless I see that brother. One of you may go and 
bring him and the rest stay confined here till he 
comes." Then to give them plenty of chance to 
think it over he put them in prison for three days. 
At the end of that time he called them again and 
gave them more favorable terms. If they would 
leave one in Egypt, the rest might go back with food 



66 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

and bring their youngest brother to show the truth 
of their words. They agreed readily enough, and, 
all unconscious that Joseph could understand their 
Palestinian speech, began to say, " This trouble has 
come to us because we closed our ears to the plead- 
ings of our brother when he was in trouble." 
Reuben said, " If you had only listened to me! but 
you would not." Their remorse moved Joseph to 
tears, but he turned away that they should not know 
how tender a heart was hidden under his harsh bear- 
ing. Then he bound Simeon, the second oldest — 
he would spare Reuben the oldest — and sent the 
others off with their grain sacks full of food. They 
also carried, unknown to themselves, the bags of 
money they had brought to buy grain, stowed away 
in the tops of the sacks. 

It was with mingled feelings of relief and dread 
that they told the tale of their adventures to their 
father, but when they found their money, which they 
had put in the hands of the Egyptian official, in their 
own grain sacks, they were frightened. 

Between the dread of returning to Egypt and 
Jacob's fierce determination not to let Benjamin go, 
the time dragged on till the food was once more 
gone, while Simeon lay in prison in Egypt. 

There were long discussions over a second trip. 
At last, persuaded that the journey would be useless 
without Benjamin, Jacob reluctantly gave his con- 
sent. They took gifts of the luxuries of the country, 
such as a little wild honey and balsam and pistachio 
nuts and almonds, and went back to Egypt with fear 
and trembling. 



JOSEPH AND HIS FAMILY 67 

The story, interested in the fortunes of the anxious 
brothers and the broken-hearted old father, quite 
forgets to tell us the thoughts of the premier of 
Egypt, outwardly so engrossed in the affairs of state, 
as time for the journey passed and the brothers did 
not appear. At last one day, among the groups in 
his court, he spied the timid and anxious faces of the 
Syrian shepherds; and among them one whom he 
knew must be Benjamin. He did not dare trust him- 
self before the crowd but had them taken to his 
house. It is no wonder that they were afraid when 
in their uncouth and travelstained garments they 
were ushered into the unaccustomed luxury of this 
noble's house. They all hastened to tell the steward 
that they had not stolen the money, they only found 
it in their sacks and had brought it back — a story 
unlikely on its face. But the steward dismissed the 
subject. " The money you found must have been a 
gift from your God. I had what you paid me; " 
and he brought in Simeon and told the confused and 
puzzled little company that they were to have the 
honor of dining with the premier. They hastily 
prepared as best they could, laid out their little coun- 
try gifts and waited his coming with troubled hearts. 

Fancy the eagerness Joseph's stately leisure con- 
cealed when he came in. " The old man you told 
me about, your father — is he alive? Is he well? " 
11 Is this your youngest brother? " " God bless you, 
my son," he said, and then he could say no more, and 
went to his room where he could give way to his 
feelings. At dinner he was again the haughty 
Egyptian noble, looking down from his upper table 



68 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

and singling out the younger brother in the dishes of 
food sent down to them. But here again something 
uncanny happened. The brothers were seated in 
exact order of birth, and how should the servants be 
able to do that? 

There w r as no delay this time. Their sacks were 
speedily filled, and when the next morning's sun arose 
they were already on the road to the desert. They 
were astounded when the steward came riding up 
and berated them for stealing his master's divining 
cup. They pledged their lives on their innocence, 
but to their amazement the cup was found in Ben- 
jamin's sack. It was a perplexed and saddened 
company who were brought back into Joseph's pres- 
ence. 

Joseph offered the scared and humbled shep- 
herds freedom and proposed to keep Benjamin, the 
seeming culprit, as a slave. Would they abandon 
Benjamin to his fate for the sake of their own safety? 
It was a marvelously clever test of character. Then 
Judah spoke. He told why his aged father loved 
Benjamin above all the rest; told how they had pled 
with him to allow Benjamin to come, and now, he 
said, they could not go back and leave their father's 
beloved son in Egypt. Let him, Judah, stay as a 
slave, and the old father have his favorite son. It 
was a noble plea, full of tender affection and unself- 
ish devotion. 

The test was ended. There was no need of fur- 
ther delay. " Leave us alone," Joseph cried, and 
the steward and police and clerks and interpreters all 



JOSEPH AND HIS FAMILY 69 

went out, leaving the frightened shepherds alone in 
the great judgment hall with the premier. Then the 
great officer came down from his high seat, dropped 
his haughty bearing, dropped his Egyptian speech, 
and in the language of his boyhood made himself 
known to his astounded brothers; and the strong men 
wept together. 

The rest of the life of Joseph is told more briefly. 
Each step in it shows the nobility of his character. 
His reconciliation with his brothers was in the second 
year of the famine, and he brought his father and 
all the encampment down to Egypt. He gained 
permission from Pharaoh for them to settle in 
Goshen, a land of wide plains in the east of Egypt, 
between the Nile and the Isthmus of Suez, near the 
road by which they came from Palestine. Here 
Jacob died, and his body was brought back to Hebron 
and buried in the cave which Abraham had bought 
for a burial place. After his death the brethren 
were afraid that, now their father was gone, Joseph 
would avenge his old wrongs on them, and they came 
saying that their father had told them to ask his 
forgiveness. " Forgive? " he said, " You were for- 
given long ago. It has all worked out for good." 

The Egyptians regarded a hundred and ten years 
as the ideal lifetime. Tradition said that Joseph 
reached that age. Had he not clung to his ideals 
his life might easily have been wrecked by his 
troubles. He refused to let those ideals go, and his 
reward was honor and long life and loyal sons and 
the consciousness that his life had been of use. 



7 o THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

Genesis 42, The first journey of Joseph's brothers to 
Egypt. Genesis 43: 1-44: 3, The second journey. Genesis 
44: 4-45 : 15, The premier and his shepherd brothers. Gen- 
esis 45: 16-46:7, 47: 1-12, The reunited family. Genesis 
50: 15-26, The death of Joseph. 



CHAPTER XI 

EGYPT 
The Land Made by a River 

So much of the stories of the old heroes in Israel 
is laid in Egypt that it is worth while to turn aside 
for some special study of this land and its people. 

Egypt is like no other country in the world. Most 
countries depend for fertility upon rain. Egypt has 
little or no rain, except along the sea on the northern 
border. Instead of carrying water from the land, 
its one river brings water to it. The Nile rises in 
the mountains and lakes of Eastern Africa and flows 
for over two thousand miles through a desert. 
Every year it overflows, after the rainy season on 
the upper Nile, and floods the low lands near its 
banks, dropping a sediment of black earth from its 
muddy waters. Egypt — the Egypt which yields 
crops and is inhabited — is simply the flooded land 
along the river. Everything else is desert. 

The whole course of the Nile through Nubia and 
Egypt is in a valley which the river made for itself 
ages ago. For three hundred miles above Cairo, 
through most of ancient Egypt, the valley is from ten 
to fifteen miles wide, and the rock through which it 
is cut is limestone. Above that is harder sandstone, 
and the valley averages less than two miles wide. 

7i 



72 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

Sometimes the river washes the foot of the western 
cliffs. Below Cairo the Nile branches, and goes to 
the sea by two main mouths. In ancient times there 
were seven mouths, but most of them have become 
filled up. The three-cornered piece of land enclosed 
by the mouths of the river is the delta of the Nile, so 
called from the Greek letter A. Its width at the 
shore is 155 miles, and its length up the river, about 
100 miles. Once it was a great bay of water, now 
it is a great bay of marsh and fertile land. In the 
days of early Bible history it was mostly marsh, full 
of pools and slow, winding streams where the nobles 
hunted wild fowl among the tall reeds. 

If Egypt were laid on the map of New England 
and reversed, so that the seashore lay to the south 
instead of the north, with the western corner of the 
delta at New York, the eastern corner would reach 
to Narragansett Bay, the northern point of the delta 
about to the northern border of Massachusetts. 
This was lower Egypt. Upper Egypt, the ribbon of 
green up the Nile, would reach up the Connecticut 
River to its head and on into Canada half way to 
Quebec. The whole fertile area is about the size of 
Maryland, a little larger than New Hampshire, 
about one-tenth smaller than Belgium. It has a 
very dense population; at present over twelve mil- 
lions, while Maryland has about one and a third 
millions. In the times of the Hebrew residence in 
Egypt the population must have been smaller, for 
much of the delta was given over to marshes, and 
there was also left unoccupied land on which the 
shepherds from the East were allowed to settle. 



EGYPT 73 

The people lived in towns and villages, strung up the 
Nile valley like pearls on a string. 

Geography has more to do with the growth of 
civilization than we are apt to think. On a great, 
level expanse of country, when people become too 
numerous in any one place they simply scatter. That 
is not the way for civilization to grow. Civilization 
begins with specialization of labor, where each man 
learns to do some one thing better than most others 
can do it. If the people of a region became so many 
that the country would not support them in the way 
they had lived, and if they could not simply strike 
their tents and move off to some unoccupied region, 
then they were obliged to learn new ways. Special- 
ization of labor arose, and civilization began. 

Two of the earliest civilizations of the world 
arose in river valleys shut in by deserts or mountains 
so that emigration was not easy; Babylonia and 
Egypt. Both built cities, formed governments and 
developed writing before 4000 B. c. How much 
earlier the civilization had begun to grow, no one is 
able to say. When the Hebrews went into Egypt, 
perhaps between 1400 and 1300 B. c, Egypt was al- 
ready very old — older than the famous days of 
Greece and Rome are to us. Where the Syrian road 
came to the Nile stood the ancient capital, Memphis, 
near the present Cairo. From Memphis the 
Hebrew shepherds who journeyed to the city could 
look across the river, as one can from Cairo to-day, 
and see the great pyramids, already about 1500 years 
old. They had stood there five times as long as 
from the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock 



74 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

until the present. Up the river sailed boats with 
single masts and one large sail, bearing wheat and 
fowl and lambs and melons and vegetables of many 
kinds, and sometimes a consignment of slaves. 
Down the river the boats brought granite blocks 
for building, and some products of the southern 
region. Galleys loaded with soldiers went past, now 
and then a royal barge bore the Pharaoh himself to 
make a journey about his dominions. 

But remember that all this was on the Nile. Most 
of the Hebrews seldom saw it. They lived farther 
east, where they could pitch their tents and pasture 
their herds on the margin of the desert. They spoke 
their own language and followed the customs of their 
shepherd fathers, and the cultured Egyptians looked 
down on them as uncivilized barbarians. Other 
Semitic shepherd tribes were, as inscriptions show, 
also allowed to come into the eastern part of 
Egypt. 

The history of ancient Egypt may be divided into 
Early Egypt, before 2980 B.C.; the Old Kingdom, 
2980-2475 B.C.; a period of chaos, 2475-2160 B.C.; 
the Middle Kingdom, 2160-1788 B.C.; the Hyksos 
rule, 1788-1580 B.C.; The New Empire, 1580 — 
about 1 1 50 B.C.; The Period of Decline, 1150-525 
B.C., at the end of which it was captured by Persia. 
The history is also divided into the rule of twenty- 
six dynasties. 

The time when the Hebrews came into Egypt has 
been much discussed. The traditions about the 
Egyptian story took shape so much later that the 
people had forgotten how long their sojourn lasted. 



EGYPT 75 

One of the earlier collections of traditions suggests 
four generations, which would be between a hundred 
and a hundred and fifty years (Gen. 15: 16). An- 
other later version of the tradition makes it four 
hundred and thirty years (Ex. 12:40), and both 
these estimates are repeated in different places. On 
the whole, the earlier versions of the story, with the 
shorter periods, seem the most probable. In that 
case the Hebrew shepherds came into Egypt in one 
of the most splendid periods of the empire. The 
armies of Egypt were fighting in Nubia. Great 
temples were being built at various places along the 
Nile. Palestine had long belonged to Egypt, and 
about this time the Pharaohs took as their wives 
princesses from the kingdoms of Syria. 

The later nation of Israel was a collection of 
tribes who spoke the same language and were re- 
lated in blood. As they came together into a nation, 
they all contributed the traditions of their early his- 
tory and wove them together as though their an- 
cestors had all gone through the same experiences. 
During the latter part of the stay of the Hebrews in 
Egypt, three Pharaohs, Seti I, Ramses II, and Mer- 
neptah left inscriptions telling of campaigns in Pal- 
estine. Merneptah made a campaign in Palestine, 
about which a song of triumph has come dow r n, 

11 The Hittite Land is pacified. 
Plundered is Canaan, with every evil, 
Carried off is Askelon, seized upon is Gezer, 
Yenoam is made as a thing of nought, 
Israel is desolated, her seed is not, 
Palestine is become a widow for Egypt. 



76 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

All lands are united, they are pacified, 
Every one that is turbulent is bound by King 
Merneptah. ,, 

This shows that some people known as Israel were 
already in Palestine and contributed troops to the 
enemies of Egypt. Evidently not all the tribes of 
the later nation shared in the Egyptian experience. 

Many inscriptions of great interest have been 
found in Egypt, but, as yet, none which mentions the 
Hebrews as living there. That is not surprising. 
Inscriptions had to do with kings and nobles, not 
with despised foreign tribes. 

For a long time everything in Israel went peace- 
fully. Men were born and grew old and died and 
the greatest excitement of their lives was an occa- 
sional journey to a town near by, after the sheep- 
shearing, to sell wool. Now and then they heard 
of Egyptian armies going past on the great road to 
Palestine but what it was all about they neither knew 
nor cared. 

Meantime great things were happening in Egypt. 
There was an attempt of an emperor, Ikhnaton, to 
change the form of religion, but the priests of the 
old faith were too strong. A period of political 
confusion followed, and the eighteenth dynasty, to 
which he belonged, lost power. The nineteenth 
dynasty produced two great emperors, Seti I and 
Ramses II. Ramses reigned 67 years. He went to 
Palestine and fought a great battle against the 
Hittites, who were trying to form an empire on the 
ruins of the Egyptian power in Syria. He con- 
quered, but the need of keeping watch over affairs in 



EGYPT 77 

Syria led him to leave the old capital at Thebes, 
three hundred miles up the Nile, and come down to 
the delta. 

This move had grave consequences for the 
Hebrews. The Egyptians began to reclaim the 
swamps in the delta and to push out into the lands 
to the east, till now left largely to the shepherd 
tribes. The emperor wished to fortify and place 
garrisons along the eastern frontier. He built a 
store city in Goshen, Pithom, " The House of 
Atum." He also built near it a city called after 
his own name, Per-Ramses, " The House of 
Ramses." Forts were built along the Palestine 
road. For all these works the government needed 
labor. What was easier than to impress the for- 
eigners who had been allowed to live in the land? 
Egypt had long used a system of forced labor, and 
now the Hebrews became, under its burden, little 
better than slaves. Moreover, the fact that they 
were Asiatic foreigners made them feared. The 
most dangerous enemies of Egypt were Asiatics. It 
would be well to see that such tribes as the Hebrews 
did not become too strong; so, tradition .said, the 
government determined that all Hebrew male-chil- 
dren should be killed at birth; but, the story adds, 
those to whom the orders were given revolted at the 
barbarity and did not obey. 



CHAPTER XII 

MOSES IN TRAINING 
The Education of a Leader 

The Pharaoh had ordered that all Hebrew boy 
babies should be killed. When Moses was born his 
mother hid him for three months, but every day 
brought its dangers. A hundred times her heart was 
in her mouth lest some one should discover the sex 
of her baby and reveal it to the government. At 
last her mother-love formed a daring and ingenious 
plan. She wove a little basket of papyrus reed, 
made it water-tight with bitumen, put the baby in it, 
and hid it among the reeds along the Nile, at the 
place where the daughters of Pharaoh came down to 
bathe. The older sister was left to watch and see 
what happened. 

It was a desperate chance, but it succeeded. The 
Pharaoh's daughter spied the little basket, sent a 
maid to fetch it, and, opening it, found a baby crying 
with hunger and loneliness. She saw it was a 
Hebrew, but her woman's heart had pity on it, 
which was just what the child's mother had hoped 
would happen. The sister, strolling past as though 
by accident, asked if she should not get a Hebrew 
nurse for the baby, and, of course, brought the 
mother who consented, perhaps with show of hesita- 

7S 



MOSES IN TRAINING 79 

tion, to take the child home and care for it. So the 
boy became the princess' foster child, and the mother 
was paid out of court funds for nursing her own 
baby; a touch of humor such as Eastern story- 
tellers love. The princess did not forget the baby. 
Later on she had him brought to the court and 
reared him as her foster son. 

There is a certain simplicity about this story which 
shows that it took its present form among a people 
to whom the elaborate ceremonials of the Egyptian 
court were unfamiliar. Here the Hebrews do not 
all live in Goshen, east of the delta. This family 
lives in the same town with the court, on the banks 
of the Nile. Probably those who told the story 
thought of its scene at Memphis, which was the 
capital through much of Egyptian history. The 
daughter of Pharaoh is spoken of as though she was 
the only one. In fact, Ramses II had many daugh- 
ters. Moses' sister, though a girl of the despised 
foreign race, mingles with the princess' maids and 
addresses the princess herself in a most democratic 
way. The child was named Moses by the princess, 
because, she said, she drew him out — mashah, in 
Hebrew, draw out — from the water, as though this 
Egyptian princess spoke Hebrew. The name was 
probably Egyptian and seems to be connected with 
a word for child, mesu, which often appears as a 
part of Egyptian names. An emperor, for example, 
was named Thothmes, the son of the god Thoth. 
Popular stories often explain foreign names in terms 
of the native language. 

Education in the upper circles of Egyptian society 



8o THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

was not a round of holidays. No civilization can 
endure which does not call for hard study from its 
youths. Egypt had an elaborate system of writing, 
and the officials of the court were expected to be 
expert in it. The country was governed by a compli- 
cated bureaucracy, with grades of officers. Military 
science had advanced to a stage that called for skilled 
experts in the army. Religion was in the hands of 
the priesthood, but the officials of the court were of 
necessity familiar with much ritual and mythology. 
It was a time when every man had his specialty and 
no one can suppose that this foundling adopted into 
the court would be permitted to laze away the years 
of his youth. In the busy court of Pharaoh at this 
time of stern foreign wars, building activities, new 
fortifications and expanding policies of empire, an 
idle young foreigner would have had short shrift 
from the energetic active men in control of affairs 
under Seti I or Ramses II. He must have some- 
times wished that he could be a common boy again 
and leave his tablets and be off with the other boys, 
free from the trammels of a court education. 

The great moral crisis of Moses' life came when 
he had to decide whether he would live as an Egyp- 
tian or as a Hebrew. To be sure, he was a for- 
eigner. But the Egypt of that day was somewhat 
cosmopolitan. Many Asiatics of various races had 
found homes there. There is no reason to suppose 
that he could not have had an honorable career as 
an Egyptian official had he so chosen. It must have 
been a temptation. Any energetic, active young 
man with his training would have been drawn toward 



MOSES IN TRAINING 81 

public life. A later Hebrew tradition, given by 
Josephus, made Moses an officer in the Egyptian 
army, brilliantly successful in a war with Nubia. 
There is not the least ground for the tradition, but it 
suggests the career that might have opened to Moses 
had he chosen. 

But Moses could not forget that he was a Hebrew. 
He found that, after all, his sympathies were with 
his own people. This was not strange. His early 
years had been spent in a Hebrew home; and the 
influence of an early home is very strong, no matter 
how much it may be overlaid by later education. 

Whether his choice was slowly and deliberately 
made or whether his sympathy flashed out in a sud- 
den, unpremeditated act, one cannot say. Either ex- 
planation would be a natural one for the story. 
One day he was watching the labor of the Hebrew 
serfs and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. 
His national feeling flamed out in a sudden blow, and 
the Egyptian fell dead. Probably Moses never in- 
tended to kill him ; but what was done, was done. It 
was a serious matter, for Egypt was not the lawless 
desert. The courts were strict with those who took 
the law into their own hands, especially when the 
victim was an Egyptian. The only thing to do was 
to conceal his hasty deed; and he hurriedly buried 
the body in the sand and hastened away. 

The man he had rescued was indiscreet enough to 
tell the story, doubtless in gratitude to Moses, and it 
soon became known among the Hebrews. On an- 
other day Moses found two Hebrews quarreling. 
He attempted to make peace, but one of them turned 



82 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

on him and said, " Who made you judge? Will you 
kill me, as you did the Egyptian? " Almost as 
quickly the rumor had spread to the court, and 
Moses had to flee for his life. The government 
would not deal lightly with a man who might be 
setting up as the leader of a slave rebellion. 

It was with a heavy heart that this young man 
from the court, in the disguise of a Hebrew peasant's 
dress, with a meager bundle of baggage and some 
money concealed in his belt, got permission of a 
caravan leader to join his caravan going back to the 
east from Egypt. He had been willing to give up 
his Egyptian career in the hope of doing something 
for his own people, but his first attempt to champion 
them had resulted in nothing but failure. It must 
have added to his discomfort that his failure was 
all his own fault. He had been foolishly rash, and 
so he, the would-be rescuer of his people, was going 
away from them, a fugitive, discredited and useless. 
Fancy how, as he lay on the sand looking up at the 
stars at night, he must often have called himself a 
silly fool. He had failed, and he deserved to fail. 

Moses did not dare to go back into Palestine. 
That was under the control of Egypt and Moses 
could not have remained long hidden. His only 
refuge was among the wandering tribes in the no- 
man's-land of Northern Arabia. He abandoned 
whatever caravan he may have started with, and, 
too poor to be worth robbing, picked his way from 
well to well of the half desert country between Pales- 
tine and the eastern gulf of the Red Sea. One night, 



MOSES IN TRAINING 83 

when sunset was calling the flocks home, he sat by a 
well near an encampment of Midianites. The 
daughters of the priest of the tribe came to the well 
with their father's flocks, as long before Rachel had 
come with her father's. While they were filling the 
troughs shepherds came up and drove them away so 
that they might water their own sheep first. Moses, 
with ready chivalry, took the maidens' part and 
helped them water their flocks in spite of the churlish 
ruffians. The story has its touch of romance. The 
deed of courtesy won for him a home and employ- 
ment, and one of the maidens whom he championed 
became his wife. 

The story-tellers do not pretend that the change 
was a welcome one. It was not so much the question 
of soft clothes and dainty fare. He may have been 
ready to exchange these for the desert sheepskin and 
the handful of dates. He may even have found the 
directness and simplicity of the shepherd camp not a 
bad exchange for the ceremonials of court society. 
The hard thing must have been that he had to lay 
aside his ambition to help his people. He buried 
this ambition in the grave of lost hopes when he 
consented to become the son-in-law of his employer. 
Perhaps he thought that his hasty action showed him 
to be unworthy of his high ambitions. 

There are two ways of taking failure. The shal- 
low man treats it as final. If he can not do what 
he wants, then there is no use in trying to do any- 
thing. The strong man regards failure, not as final, 
but as an incident in progress. If one road is 



84 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

blocked he looks around to find another. If he can 
not do a big thing he will be content to do a small 
thing; and that is the way this fine old story shows 
Moses taking his failure. 

Exodus 1:8-14, The Hebrews in Egypt. Exodus 2, The 
romantic story of Moses' youth. 



CHAPTER XIII 

MOSES THE DELIVERER 

The Story of a Vision and a Conflict 

As Moses dwelt with his flocks in the wide, silent 
stretches of the wilderness, he thought much of his 
nation and of what he had wanted to do for them. 
Now and then he heard about matters in Egypt, and 
always the report was that things were growing 
worse. When men live much alone and their minds 
become absorbed in some great subject it often hap- 
pens that they have visions. So, the tradition says, 
Moses had a vision. He saw a common thorn bush 
of the desert glowing as though its dry branches were 
all on fire, and yet it did not burn up. He turned to 
look at it, when the voice of God spoke to him. 

In the East the mark of reverence was, and still 
is, to take off the shoes. "Take thy shoes from off 
thy feet, for this place is holy ground," said the 
voice. Then he felt within himself that God, the 
God of his fathers, called him to go back and lead 
Israel out from Egypt. He hesitated. How could 
he even make his own people believe in his message? 
Then God gave him confidence in his brother, Aaron; 
and promised that he would not be alone in his work. 

This is the story of a great spiritual experience. 
It is not told in abstract terms, as it would be to-day, 

85 



86 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

but in the glowing imagery of poetic symbolism, 
which religious literature has always loved. 

This experience gave Moses not only a new con- 
ception of duty, but a new conception of God. One 
of the two earlier versions of the tradition describes 
it as the revelation of a new name of God. This is 
the name Yahweh, Jehovah in our English Bible; 
11 He is," the existent, powerful God. When God 
himself speaks the name he says, not " He is," but 
" I am." " Go to the people," said he, " and say 
/ am has sent you." The other early version of 
the Hebrew stories used the name Yahweh from the 
beginning, and so does not regard it as introduced by 
Moses. The latest version of the stories, usually 
called the priestly version, also makes Moses intro- 
duce the name Yahweh, and in this version God says 
plainly, " I was known to your fathers as El Shaddai 
(God Almighty) , but by my name Yahweh was I not 
known." (Ex. 6 : 23.) Evidently there was a very 
persistent memory in Israel that the name Yahweh 
was introduced in the time of Moses.. 

To know the name of a God, in the ancient world, 
was to be able to appeal to his power. The new 
name of God which Moses had gained was the sym- 
bol of a power of God. The Hebrews could appeal 
to this new name and draw from a new reservoir of 
divine strength which their fathers had not known. 

So with his new sense of God and his new feeling 
of a mission, Moses brought back his sheep to the 
camp and asked of his father-in-law permission to 
take his wife and children and go back to Egypt. 
Moses' family knew where he had fled; and Aaron, 



MOSES THE DELIVERER 87 

moved by an impulse which seemed to the brothers 
the direct guidance of God, had started to see him. 
The two met in the wilderness at a mountain held 
sacred as a shrine of God. Moses found in Aaron a 
sympathetic soul and through the rest of their lives, 
with one notable exception, the two brothers worked 
together as leaders of the people. They supple- 
mented each other excellently. Moses was the ex- 
ecutive, a quiet, diligent personality who furnished 
the plan and inspiration of their activity. Aaron 
was bold, outspoken, with a compelling voice and 
personality which made the king himself listen when 
he spoke. 

When the two brothers came to Egypt they called 
the leaders of Israel together and said that God had 
sent them to redeem the people. It was welcome 
news to the Hebrews and they were ready to worship 
this God with the new name. Perhaps, in the long 
generations, the worship of the God of their fathers 
had died out. 

The nation seems also to have lost its power of 
action. Once they had stayed in Egypt because it 
was easier than to go back to Palestine. Now they 
had to stay because they had no leaders who dared 
to take them out of Egypt. Moses and Aaron 
asked permission for the Hebrews to. go out of 
Egypt into the eastern desert and sacrifice to their 
God. They were curtly refused. Still worse, 
Pharaoh regarded this request as proof that the 
people were not working hard enough. The large, 
sundried-bricks of which most walls in Egypt were 
built were made of mud, held together by straw 



88 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

chopped into short lengths. He ordered that no 
straw be given them. Let them gather stubble from 
the fields, and turn out as many bricks as before ! 
That would keep the plotting agitators busy. 

Naturally the Hebrews cursed Moses for bringing 
this added trouble on them. Moses was discour- 
aged, but he persisted in demanding permission for 
his people to go out of Egypt. Then began a series 
of disasters known as the Plagues of Egypt. The 
stories of these plagues are very dramatic. In each 
case Moses and Aaron come into the presence of 
Pharaoh and demand the release of Israel. 
Pharaoh refuses. They threaten a plague. When 
it comes, Pharaoh is often frightened into giving con- 
sent, but withdraws it when the danger is over. 
The story is arranged in a series of climaxes, the 
plagues becoming more severe, the last being the 
worst of all. 

i. When Pharaoh refused to let the people go 
Moses threatened that the Nile would run blood. 
This happened. The sacred Nile on which they de- 
pended for all their water and which they worshiped 
as a God turned red as blood, was offensive to the 
smell and was polluted with dead fish. For seven 
days this lasted. The magicians persuaded Pharaoh 
that this disaster was not the work of the Hebrew 
God, and Pharaoh refused to let Israel go. 

2. Moses threatened a plague of frogs. This 
happened. Frogs swarmed in the sacred Nile, in- 
vaded the houses, hid in the beds, baked with the 
bread in the ovens, hopped into the dough in the 
kneading-bowls. Pharaoh was convinced that the 



MOSES THE DELIVERER 89 

Hebrew God had caused this plague. He asked 
that Jehovah be entreated for relief. The next day 
the frogs died; but again Pharaoh refused to let the 
people go. 

3. Moses threatened a plague of lice. This hap- 
pened. The vermin were so thick that it seemed the 
very sand had been turned into lice. It was a pecul- 
iar torture to the fastidious Egyptians, more cleanly 
in person than any other ancient people. The magi- 
cians gave up. " This is the work of Jehovah," they 
said; but still Pharaoh refused to surrender. 

4. On the next morning Moses and Aaron met 
Pharaoh and threatened a host of flies; but said that 
Goshen, where the Hebrews lived, would be exempt. 
Great swarms of flies filled all the houses and made 
life miserable till Pharaoh called Moses and said, 
" Sacrifice here in the land, if you wish." " We can 
not do that," was the reply, " for we shall sacrifice 
animals sacred to the Egyptians. They never would 
allow it; " which was true enough, as Pharaoh knew. 
11 Go, then," he said, " but do not go far." Then 
when the plague of flies was over he refused to let 
them go at all. 

5. Moses threatened a cattle disease, and a con- 
tagious plague spread among the Egyptian cattle, 
but did not enter the herds of the Hebrews, and still 
Pharaoh would not submit. 

6. Moses and Aaron stood once more before 
Pharaoh and threw up into the air handfuls of fine 
ashes, like a symbol of God's curse; and all over 
Egypt boils and sores broke out on men and beasts. 
Still Pharaoh refused to yield. 



9 o THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

7. Again early in the morning Moses and Aaron 
stood before Pharaoh. " Jehovah will bring hail 
on the land," they cried. Then with thunder and 
lightning came hail so severe that men and cattle 
were killed and the flax and barley, already partly 
grown, were destroyed; but Goshen had no storm. 
While the storm was still on Pharaoh sent for the 
brothers and cried in a panic, " This is enough. 
Your God is stronger than I. I submit." But 
when the storm was over Pharaoh retracted his word 
and would not let them go. 

8. Moses threatened an invasion of locusts that 
should eat what the hail had left. The frightened 
court pled with Pharaoh to yield, and he offered to 
let the men go and sacrifice if they would go alone. 
Then an east wind brought the locusts. They cov- 
ered all the land and ate up every plant that the 
hail had left, till not a green thing remained in 
Egypt. Again Pharaoh sent for the brothers and, 
more humble than ever before, pled with them to 
forgive him and go as they pleased. That night a 
west wind swept the locusts away. Then Pharaoh 
once more refused to fulfill his promise. 

9. The time of warning was passed. The next 
plague came without it. God brought darkness 
over Egypt, so dense that no man could see the face 
of another, except among the Hebrews in Goshen, 
where there was light. Again Pharaoh attempted 
to compromise. He said that all the people might 
go, but the flocks must remain in Egypt. Moses 
refused. Pharaoh in anger refused ever to see them 



MOSES THE DELIVERER 91 

again, and Moses retorted, u You are right. You 
never will see us again, n and went out. 

10. The last disaster was the most serious of all. 
On a certain night the Hebrews held a sacrificial feast 
and marked the doorpost of the house with the 
blood of the sacrifice. Then the messenger of death 
sped through the land of Egypt and smote the eldest 
in every house not marked, from the palace of 
Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the hut of the 
prisoner who lay in the dungeon. At midnight a 
cry arose from all the land, for in every house there 
was one dead. Moses and Aaron were hurriedly 
called to the court and told to take Israel out of 
Egypt immediately. The people were willing to 
give them anything they asked — gold, silver, 
jewelry, — anything if they would only go. So the 
Hebrews started that very night, driving their flocks 
before them in the starlight. 

This is the dramatic story of the ten plagues, as it 
is told in Exodus. The question naturally rises, how 
far do the traditions represent actual events? 

Two different kinds of answers can be given: ( 1 ) 
Old traditions are not to be treated as accurate his- 
tory. Our versions of them date from a period 
hundreds of years after Israel left Egypt. It would 
be absurd to demand that they should be correct in 
all respects. (2) The earliest versions, which best 
represent the popular stories as told in early Israel, 
give accounts which might easily have grown out of 
real events. The Nile, which always takes a reddish 
color in its rise, became specially discolored and 



92 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

poisoned with decaying matter. The masses of dead 
frogs bred flies, always numerous in Egypt, and epi- 
demics of disease naturally followed in their train. 
Great storms, with hail, while very rare in Egypt, 
are not unknown, and the description of the destruc- 
tion caused by the locusts is not at all exaggerated. 
It is easy to see, in these stories of the plague, the 
memory of a series of national disasters which the 
Hebrews believed to be God's punishment upon 
Egypt. At last, when an epidemic of fatal disease 
sweeps through the land, the Egyptians themselves, 
panic-stricken, believe for the moment that it is 
caused by the God of Israel, and hurry the Hebrews 
out of the country. 

Exodus 3:1-4:17, The call to leadership. Exodus 4: 
27-6: 1, Attempts at release. Exodus 7-1 1, The story of 
the plagues. Exodus 12: 29-36, The night of release. 



CHAPTER XIV 

AT THE RED SEA 

The Birth of a Nation 

Panics are never permanent. What a frightened 
crowd does at night it is usually sorry for the next 
morning. The Egyptians had hurried the Hebrews 
out of their homes in the darkness, giving them 
anything they asked if they would only go and take 
themselves and their flocks and all their goods, along 
with their God, out of Egypt. 

The next morning, however, when they saw things 
in the clear light of day, they were sorry that they 
had let the Hebrews go. Their panic-stricken ac- 
tion of the night seemed foolish. Why had they let 
these serfs go ? They gathered an army and started 
out to round up this mob of serfs and bring them and 
their flocks back again. There is a certain humor in 
the haste with which the Egyptians tried to undo in 
the morning what they had done the night before. 
They had yet to learn a very old lesson, that when a 
thing is once done, it never can be undone. 

In the dawning light the Hebrews gathered at the 
towns near which they lived — Ramses and Pithom, 
whose other name, Thuku, was in course of time 
made over into the Hebrew name Succoth, — and 
started out, a motley crowd, along the roa,4 toward 

93 



94 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

the east. The road soon branched into the two 
great highways out of Egypt. One turned toward 
the north and went through the desert near the 
coast. This was the great coast road along which 
their ancestors, so tradition said, had come down into 
Egypt. It has been used from time immemorial and 
is in use to this day. There were various reasons 
why they could not take this route. Sandy stretches 
of desert and wide spaces between watering places 
made it a difficult road for flocks. Worse still, no 
sooner would the desert be passed than they would 
encounter strong and well armed people and they 
were not prepared to fight for camping grounds. 

The other road led more directly east through the 
Isthmus of Suez, where a branch turned south along 
the shore of the Gulf of Suez to the turquoise mines 
in the rugged mountains a little back from the coast. 
The main road kept on to the east across the high 
lands to the port of Elath, at the head of the eastern 
arm of the Red Sea. This road is also still a cara- 
van route, used in modern times as a land route for 
the Moslem pilgrims going from Egypt to Mecca. 
Since the Hebrews could not take the direct northern 
road to Palestine this more southern road was their 
only way out of Egypt. 

Egypt had so many enemies in the east that she 
had long ago fortified the places where the roads 
came over the frontier. Ramses II had strength- 
ened the fortifications. Walls had also been built 
along at least the more easily crossed parts of the 
Isthmus, like the great Roman wall across Scotland. 



AT THE RED SEA 95 

The Egyptian government did not intend that any 
person should come or go over the eastern border 
without permission. 

It was only fifteen or twenty miles from the places 
where the Hebrews gathered to the frontier. It is a 
dusty, sandy road, more than half desert. To-day 
the railway from Cairo to Ismailia follows in part 
the same general course. It would seem that when 
they approached the fortress at the border (Etam, 
Egyptian Hetem, fortress) they were refused pass- 
age, and were obliged either to turn back or to follow 
along the wall toward the south. They did the lat- 
ter. The way was into the desert, but there was no 
choice. 

There may have been another day or two of wan- 
dering to the south. The wall which they were fol- 
lowing came to the edge of the water, which even 
more effectively shut off their route to the east. All 
they could do was to feed their flocks on the scanty 
vegetation of the shore and look hopelessly at the 
sandy ranges of desert to the west and the stretch 
of shallow but impassable water to the east. Then 
near the close of the day they suddenly saw, over 
the distant ridges of sand, armed troops and horses 
and chariots. They knew well what that meant. It 
was the end of their fine hopes of freedom. It is 
no wonder that, under this nervous strain, they 
turned on Moses with bitterness. " We told you 
so," they said. " We told you to let us alone. It 
was better to serve the Egyptians than to die here 
in the wilderness. Were there no graves in Egypt 



96 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

that you must lead us out here to be buried?" 
Moses met the outburst with calmness. He was 
sure that Jehovah would yet save them. 

The sun set and the night came on before the 
Egyptian armies, toiling through the sand, drew 
near. They camped for the night, after the fashion 
of Oriental armies who seldom fought after dark, 
and expected easily to surround and drive back the 
Hebrews in the morning. 

During the night the most memorable event in all 
the early traditions of Israel took place. As the 
early version of the traditions tells the story, a strong 
east wind blew all that night and drove back the 
shallow water in front of the Hebrews, so that a 
way lay open before them straight across to the 
other side. Here again Moses' quality of leader- 
ship came out. He saw in this strangely opened 
road Jehovah's deliverance and lost no time in start- 
ing the people across, tired though they must have 
been with the day's strain. So speedily did they 
move that when the morning dawned all the encamp- 
ment was safely over on the eastern shore. 

We can fancy how astounded the Egyptian army 
were to arise in the morning and find their prey es- 
caped. But their leaders were as daring and un- 
daunted as was Moses, and the army started across 
after the Hebrews. 

The storm had blown itself out, and suddenly the 
wind changed. Possibly the change of the tide also 
helped the result. The waters came back. The 
heavy chariot wheels sank in the mud, the horses 
stuck fast and soon the entire army was engulfed in 



AT THE RED SEA 97 

the returning waters. Tradition said that not a man 
escaped. 

It is quite natural that the later versions of the 
story should make a wonderful event still more won- 
derful. The priestly version had it that God di- 
vided the waters, so that when the Hebrews went 
through " the waters were a wall unto them, on their 
right hand and on their left" (Ex 14: 22). Per- 
haps the later form of the story is influenced by a 
song in celebration of the event, where, in poetic 
imagery, the singer said, 

" With the blast of thy nostrils the waters were piled up, 
The floods stood upright as an heap, 
The deeps were congealed in the midst of the sea " 

(Ex. 15:8). 

As the early versions tell it, the occurrence lies 
quite within the range of possibility. A combina- 
tion of wind and tide sometimes leaves exposed a 
long reach of land at the northern end of the Red 
Sea. In April and May such winds often blow with 
great force, followed by strong winds in the opposite 
direction. The thing which made the Hebrews al- 
ways look back on this event as the direct act of God 
was not that the event itself was miraculous but that 
it took place just when it did, so as to make a way 
of escape for the Hebrews. 

There has been much discussion as to where the 
crossing took place. On the Isthmus of Suez there 
is a series of lakes. The Suez Canal runs at present 
through all these lakes. The Hebrew name for the 
waters crossed, the Sea of Sedge, might have applied 



9 8 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

to any one of the lakes as well as to the Red Sea. 
Furthermore, it is quite certain that the arm of the 
Red Sea itself reached farther north then than now. 
It is fruitless to seek for the exact spot of crossing. 
Through some stretch of shallow water, at some 
point of the present Suez Canal, where the great 
ships with the commerce of the world pass between 
low banks of yellow sand, the Hebrews passed out 
of Egypt. 

Is it any wonder that when they finally were sure 
of their safety they went wild with joy? Miriam, 
the sister of Moses and Aaron, grasped a timbrel 
and, in the oriental fashion, led the women in the 
slow movements of ceremonial dance, very possibly 
using some ancient dance which belonged to their 
ancestral worship, one improvising words and the 
others responding with a chorus. It is perhaps this 
chorus which the story gives: 

Sing ye to Jehovah, for he hath triumphed gloriously; 
The horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. 

A long poem said to have been sung on this occa- 
sion was current in Israel, and the writer of Exodus 
has also inserted that (Ex. 15: 1-18). Though at 
least some of it seems to be later, it is a noble poem, 
but the song improvised on the sandy shore that 
morning may have been less perfect as a poem. 
One wonders if the people apologized to Moses for 
their ungracious words to him on the other side. 

A matter of interest is the number of people whom 
Moses led out. The early Hebrews, caring little 



AT THE RED SEA 99 

about dates and numbers, remembered it simply as 
a large migration. Naturally, when numbers were 
given they were not made too small; six hundred 
thousand men besides women and children (Ex. 12: 
37), they said. Compared with numbers given 
later, when they were settled in Palestine, or with 
the probability of their position as serfs in Egypt, 
that number seems to indicate a patriotic desire to 
glorify the past. Perhaps an earlier form was six 
hundred clans, or groups of related families, which 
would not be impossible. Along with them went 
those whom the account calls a " mixed multitude "; 
runaway slaves, poor men who had nothing to lose, 
captives of war, Syrians and Arabs who took their 
chances with the fugitive Hebrews. Altogether, the 
migration was not easy to lead. They were an un- 
disciplined mob; only a leader with genius could 
mold them into a self-controlled nation. That was 
the task which Moses took up; and before he got 
through he doubtless often wished himself back 
among the docile sheep in Midian. 

The people could not stay long on the barren shore 
of the Sea of Sedge. Need of pasture for their 
flocks, if nothing else, would drive them on. They 
must scatter widely over the country, going slowly 
because of the flocks and the little children, but all 
keeping the same general direction and at night camp- 
ing for safety as near together as possible. A bras- 
ier of coals held aloft on a pole marked the head of 
the caravan. In the day a column of smoke arose 
from it (ind in the night the glowing light could be 



ioo THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

seen afar. This is a device still sometimes used 
with large caravans. In the tradition of the He- 
brews, this pillar of cloud by day and fire by night 
became the symbol of the guidance of God. 

Exodus 13:17-14:31, At the Red Sea. Exodus 15: 
I— 21, The Song of Deliverance. 




The Mountains of the Sinai Peninsula 



CHAPTER XV 

THE FIRST STAGE OF THE WILDERNESS JOURNEY 
How They Came to the Mountain of God 

The Hebrews had still a choice of roads after 
they had passed over the sea. They might go south 
along the shore of the Gulf of Suez, then turn into 
the ravines and take refuge among the lofty, rugged 
mountains. This southern route was long held to 
be that taken by the Hebrews, and Mount Sinai, to 
which they soon came, has been placed among the 
peaks at the southern end of the peninsula. A 
famous convent of the Greek Church stands on the 
traditional mountain. This region, however, was 
Egyptian territory. If the Hebrews were trying to 
get away from the power of Egypt, it is often said, 
this is not the place to which they would have gone. 
In spite of the long tradition, then, many are inclined 
to look elsewhere for the route of the Hebrews. 

Straight across the plateau in the northern part 
of the peninsula ran a caravan route to the port at 
the head of the Eastern gulf of the Red Sea. It 
was the road by which Moses had lately come from 
Midian. It led directly to the pasture lands he 
knew best and to the Midianites, among whom he 
had found a home and friends. So far as is known 
Egypt never tried to control this road. Many 
think that this was the road taken by the Hebrews, 

IOI 



102 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

and that Sinai (or Horeb, as in one version of the 
stories) is the " Mount of God M in Midian where 
Moses saw the vision of the burning bush. 

For forty years, their traditions said, the He- 
brews lived in the region south of Palestine. Forty 
is probably, as often in the Bible, to be taken as a 
round number, meaning a generation. Most of the 
time was spend at Kadesh, an oasis concerning which 
more will be said later. Here was their center and 
from here they drove their flocks to pasture over 
the region around. This shepherd life lasted till 
the people whose habits had been formed in Egypt 
had nearly all died and a new generation, reared in 
the hard life of the desert, took their places. 

Memories of the events of these years were pre- 
served in traditions, and the writers of the biblical 
books used those which showed most strikingly how 
Jehovah was educating them, and so preparing them 
to be a nation. Moses was regarded as his instru- 
ment. We have not a full history of the years in 
the wilderness, but a series of striking anecdotes, 
each illustrating the care of God. Probably as the 
stories were told among the people there was no 
attempt to put them in order of time. 

In connection with these stories the compilers wove 
in all the laws of the people, so that Exodus and 
Numbers are a mixture of story and law, while 
Leviticus and Deuteronomy are almost entirely law 
books. The reason for doing this was because tra- 
dition ascribed all the laws of the nation to the time 
of Moses, as in Persia all the laws were ascribed to 
Zoroaster, the founder of the Persian religion. 



FIRST STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 103 

They traveled from the Red Sea for three days 
through the wilderness. It was their first experi- 
ence of waterless wastes. Then in the distance they 
saw bushes and vegetation and hastened on, only to 
find that the water was brackish and undrinkable. 
Dwellers in the desert learn to endure such condi- 
tions without complaint, but the Hebrews were too 
accustomed to easy living. Their mouths were 
parched and their children were crying for thirst. 
Again they turned on their leader, as they had done 
by the Red Sea, and demanded water they could 
drink. Tradition said that God showed Moses a 
tree which he cut and threw into the water and it 
became drinkable. The story is the first of a series 
told to show that God met the needs of the people 
on their journeys. It also shows the attitude of the 
people toward Moses. They held him responsible 
for all the difficulties they might meet; but if they 
were to become a nation this must be changed. No 
people without self-reliance and resourcefulness is 
worthy to be a nation. To instill those qualities into 
them was the task of Moses. 

Later they came to Elim, whose richness, contrast- 
ing with the thirsty country they had crossed, made 
a great impression. It was a large oasis with twelve 
springs of water and seventy palm trees. Here 
they rested and refitted for their further journey. 
Moses had been a shepherd too long to overdrive 
his caravan. 

After they left the oasis of Elim they had to pass 
through the wilderness of Zin on their way to Sinai. 
As they went through this desert land their food 



104 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

began to fail, and they looked back with longing to 
the good living they had in Egypt. " Would God 
we had died there/' they sighed, u where we sat by 
the flesh-pots and ate bread to the full." Distance 
lent enchantment. They forgot the taskmaster's 
whip and the burden of labor and the bitterness 
of slavery. Better servitude and food, they now 
thought, than liberty and hunger. No nation fit for 
freedom can hold such a position. But, as the story 
was told in Israel, God had pity on them. When 
they went out at sunrise the next morning they found 
on the ground little whitish flakes which melted when 
the sun became hot, but which they could gather 
early in the morning and boil for food. They said 
11 Man hu ? " " What is it ? " and so it got the name 
manna. One form of the story also told of a flight 
of quails which added to their food supply. This is 
perhaps drawn from another tradition given in 
Num. 1 1. The great point of the story is that God 
cared for this impatient, undisciplined people, strug- 
gling with unfamiliar conditions and complaining 
because their leader had freed them from slavery. 

The Arabs of the desert sometimes make a coarse 
bread from the gum of tamarisk bushes, a whitish 
substance that melts in hot sunshine and has the 
flavor of honey, as the manna is said to have had. 
Sometimes, too, they use a lichen from the rocks, 
which is loosened and blown about the desert in dry 
weather. Food provided without labor of course 
seemed to the Hebrews to be sent from God and 
to be a direct evidence of his care. 

Moses was not leading the people aimlessly in 



FIRST STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 105 

the wilderness. He had said to Pharaoh that he 
wanted to take the people out of Egypt for a sacri- 
fice to their God, and so he did. Now he proposed 
that this sacrifice should be at the mountain where he 
had the vision of Jehovah. Moses had gone away 
with the feeling of a high mission and now he was 
bringing the people here to present them to the 
God who had delivered them. 

All the surroundings were impressive to the peo- 
ple. They had lived on the flat lands of the delta 
and most of them had never seen mountains. When 
they entered the narrow defiles with the jagged 
rocks above them, it seemed a new world full of 
wonder. At last they came to the mountain. A 
great sacrifice was held. Moses went up the moun- 
tain alone to meet God, while the people waited be- 
low. He came back and spoke to them the message 
he felt was given him by God. This laid upon them 
certain obligations, chief of which was that they 
must now worship this god Jehovah only. They 
are his own especial people, redeemed from slavery 
by him, and he would allow no other god to share 
their worship. 

Naturally the traditions about this event were 
marvelously vivid and impressive. It is difficult to 
tell how much is the memory of historic events and 
how much is poetic symbolism. This symbolism 
expresses the feeling of awe which the memory in- 
spired, the sense of the presence of a great God 
before whom nature itself trembled and veiled its 
face. At least three forms of the tradition were told 
among the people, but they all were the same in 



106 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

substance. Parts of all three were woven into the 
story in Exodus, making an account of wonderful 
impressiveness. 

They encamped before the mountain and Moses 
spoke to them in the name of God: " You have 
seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore 
you on eagle's wings, and how I brought you to 
myself. Now if you will obey my voice and keep 
my covenant, then you shall be my own treasure, my 
precious jewel." And the people answered, " All 
that Jehovah commands we will do." Moses car- 
ried their pledge to Jehovah; then they purified them- 
selves and waited two days for the revelation. On 
the morning of the third day they awoke to find thick 
clouds hanging over the mountain, and blinding 
lightnings flashing and thunder crashing amid the 
crags so that the ground shook and all the people 
trembled. Then Moses went up the crags into the 
thick darkness while the people waited trembling 
below, standing afar off and gazing in awe at the 
lightnings and moving clouds. 

When Moses came down, he brought with him 
the law of the covenant. Again the people prom- 
ised, " All that Jehovah has said, we will do." 
Then Moses arranged a great sacrifice where the 
people bound themselves by the most solemn cere- 
monies to worship only this God, who had brought 
them out of the land of Egypt. Moses took a com- 
pany of seventy of the leaders of Israel up into the 
mountain with him. They came back saying that 
they had seen God, and under his feet was a pave- 
ment of sapphire and above, the very sky for clear- 



FIRST STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 107 

ness. God had shown himself in the bright sunset 
glow above the clouds. 

For six days the mists hung low on the mountain. 
On the seventh glowing fires again appeared, and 
once more Moses went up into the clouds while the 
people waited below. The day passed and he did 
not come back. More than a month went by. 
Questions of pasturage for the flocks must have be- 
gun to trouble them. The storms on the mountain 
had passed away and life slipped back into its 
humdrum round, all the more wearisome because of 
the tense experience through which they had recently 
passed. Still they watched in vain for Moses. 
Could it be that he was dead in the mountains? 

At last after forty days, despairing of Moses, 
they appealed to Aaron. " Give us a god," they 
said, " We do not know what has become of this 
Moses." Aaron made an image of a bull for them 
and said, " Here is the god that brought you out 
of Egypt." He intended it as an image of Jehovah, 
for he made a sacrifice and a feast to Jehovah. But 
the worship of an image had too many corrupting 
associations to be safe, and their feast degenerated 
into a noisy debauch. In the midst of their shout- 
ing and dancing there appeared the stern face of 
Moses. Hot with indignation, he broke the stone 
tablets of covenant which he had carved in the moun- 
tain, threw the image into the fire, powdered the 
gold which covered it and, putting it in water, made 
the people drink it. This was a magic ordeal to 
bring sickness to those guilty of idolatry. Aaron, 
frightened at his brother's hot anger, tried to lie 



108 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

out of his share of the blame, and, as usually hap- 
pens, succeeded in making a fool of himself. " You 
know how bad these people are. They would have 
it ! I only threw their jewels into the fire, and there 
came out this bull! M 

Moses was almost in despair. All his feeling of 
triumph was gone. His lone vigil on the mountain 
when, in storm and solitude, he had felt the presence 
of God only gave the people an opportunity to deny 
the covenant they had just taken. In spite of the 
pretense of sacrificing to Jehovah their worship was 
what Jehovah never could accept. 

Moses' depression was all the greater because of 
his recent religious exaltation. It seemed to Moses 
that God himself must despair of Israel, and he pled 
with him for their forgiveness. " Thy people have 
sinned a great sin. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive 
them — ; and if not, blot me out of the book thou 
hast written." Moses had reached the point of 
complete absorption in his work. If that failed life 
was no longer of any value. 

As the story now stands in Exodus, Moses went 
again into the mountain and once more carved the 
laws of the covenant on two tablets of stone, re- 
placing those which he had broken in his anger. 
This marked the renewal of the broken covenant. 
Jehovah was willing to give the people another 
chance. 

This chapter has shown Moses in a variety of 
experiences. He had one great triumph, when he 
brought Israel to God at Horeb as evidence that 
he had so far fulfilled his commission. He had one 



FIRST STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 109 

great disappointment, when he almost despaired of 
the people as fit to worship Jehovah. He was real- 
izing, what leaders always find sooner or later, the 
fickleness of the crowd. The greatness of Moses 
is shown in his clinging to his task in spite of it all. 
The true leader does not always succeed; but he 
always goes on after a defeat. 

Exodus 15:22-16:20, The discontent of an untrained 
people. Exodus 19:1-25, 20:18-21, 24:1-18, 32:1- 
34: 10, Events at Sinai. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE COVENANT OF JEHOVAH 

How Moses Made a Constitution for His People 

The " law of the covenant M which the people 
bound themselves to accept at Sinai was believed to 
have been inscribed on two stone tablets which the 
people carried with them as memorials of this great 
event in their history. Tablets of laws were known 
in Babylonia long before. A stone monument in- 
scribed with the laws of King Hammurabi, who lived 
over six hundred years before Moses, has been dis- 
covered by modern explorers. 

What laws did Hebrew tradition assign to these 
tablets? The Ten Commandments, is the ready 
answer. And that is right; but what were the ten 
commandments? The familiar version in both the 
Jewish and Christian churches is that of Exodus 20. 
In Deuteronomy 5 the same decalogue is given, but 
with some differences. 

In Exodus 34, however, another decalogue is given 
as written on the tables of stone. The explanation 
probably is that there were in Israel two codes of 
laws, both of which seemed fundamental to the wor- 
ship of Jehovah. One form of the account of Sinai 
chose one code as most important and the other 
form chose the other code. Both contain some of 

no 



THE COVENANT OF JEHOVAH 1 1 1 

the same laws. Possibly both are later editions of 
the same original code. Ancient laws were not rig- 
idly fixed and there was no hesitation about making 
additions and changes, as we may see by comparing 
the decalogue in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. 

We may call the decalogue in Exodus 34, The Law 
of Worship. Put in brief form it is: 

1. Thou shalt worship no other god. 

2. Thou shalt make thee no molten image. 

3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. 

4. Every first-born is mine ; thou shalt sacrifice it or 

redeem it. 

5. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh 

day thou shalt rest. 

6. Thou shalt keep the feast of weeks, and the 

feast of ingathering at the end of the year. 

7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifices 

with unleavened bread. 

8. The sacrifice of the passover is not to be left 

till the morning. 

9. The best of the first fruits of the land shalt 

thou give to God. 
10. Thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother's milk. 

The commands to worship Jehovah only, not to 
make idols and to keep the Sabbath are found also 
in the other decalogue. The commands about feasts 
and sacrifices are in other parts of the laws, some of 
them several times. The curious command about 
boiling a kid (number 10) is also given twice else- 
where (Ex 23: 19, Deut. 14: 21), so it must refer 



ii2 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

to some well-known custom. Probably it was con- 
nected with the worship of other gods, but we do 
not know how. The feast of unleavened bread was 
used as a memorial of the night on which they left 
Egypt so hurriedly that they did not have time to 
leaven the bread. It may have come originally 
from an old spring festival. The other two feasts 
are also connected with the seasons and are thanks- 
giving days at the beginning and end of harvest. 
The origin of the Sabbath was perhaps connected 
with the four quarters of the moon. The Sabbath 
helped the people to remember that they were Jeho- 
vah's servants and their time belonged to him. So 
did their flocks and even their own persons, and the 
law of the first-born would not let them forget it. 
The whole group of laws was designed to instill in 
the people's minds a deep loyalty to Jehovah. 

The other decalogue, in Exodus 20, may be called 
The Law of Conduct. It is, omitting enlargements, 
as follows: 

1. Thou shalt, have no other gods before me. 

2. Thou shalt not make for thyself any graven 

image. 

3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy 

God in vain. 

4. Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. 

5. Honor thy father and thy mother. 

6. Thou shalt not kill. 

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery. 

8. Thou shalt not steal. 

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness. 
10. Thou shalt not covet. 



THE COVENANT OF JEHOVAH 113 

As a permanent religious rule of life, this code 
is far more valuable than the other. It is the best 
and most compact statement of right action that 
any ancient religion ever produced. It does not con- 
tradict the other decalogue, but supplements it. 
Worship and morals go hand in hand. 

It is interesting that these laws are found in 
groups of tens. In the older codes of Hebrew laws 
other groups of fives and tens are found. The early 
Babylonian laws often have the same grouping. 
The reason goes back to the early device for remem- 
bering by enumerating on the fingers. When writ- 
ing became more common the early form was not 
kept with care, so that many of the groups of fives 
and tens in the Hebrew laws are imperfect. 

How much of the early Hebrew laws go back to 
the time of Moses it is impossible to say. The He- 
brews, like other nations, kept revising their laws 
and assigned them all, with their revisions, to Moses 
as the great traditional law giver. In somewhat the 
same way we still speak of Webster's Dictionary; 
it is the original Webster with many additions. The 
Hebrews were correct in speaking of the law as the 
Law of Moses. He laid down the principles from 
which it all proceeds, and much of his work probably 
remained embedded in it till the last. Probably 
few of the laws were then written out. Most of 
them were the decisions given in particular cases; 
what is called case law by modern lawyers. One of 
the traditions illustrates it. 

While the camp was still at the Mountain of God 
Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, came to visit them. 



ii 4 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

He brought Moses' wife and two children, who had 
at some earlier time been sent back home for safety. 

One day he watched Moses give judgment in 
cases, as the sheik of a tribe in the desert still 
does. Now Moses had not one tribe but a group 
of tribes to manage, and the cases occupied him all 
day while the people crowded the tent waiting their 
turn. The shrewd old man saw that this w r ould 
not do. Moses w r ould break under this strain. 
Jethro w T as a man of organizing genius and suggested 
to Moses that subordinate judges be appointed to 
take the mass of cases, only the more difficult ones 
coming to him. This Moses did, keeping for him- 
self what we might call the work of the legislature 
and of the supreme court. This was the beginning 
of Hebrew civil organization, which is as necessary 
for a nation as good leaders. It is interesting that 
it came, not from Moses, but from the fertile brain 
of the old Midianite chief. 

All the accounts show very cordial relations be- 
tween Moses and this Midianite family into which 
he had married. Another place (Num. 10:29-32) 
tells how Moses urged his father-in-law to stay and 
share the prosperity of Israel, " We are going to the 
place Jehovah promised us. Come with us, and we 
will do thee good." The offer was declined, and 
Moses skillfully changed his plea. He urged not 
what his father-in-law could get, but what he could 
give. " You know this country. You can tell us 
where we can camp. You can be eyes for us." 
That is the kind of an appeal which a true man al- 



THE COVENANT OF JEHOVAH 115 

ways finds it hard to resist. The fragment closes 
without telling Jethro's answer, but later the Kenites 
were inhabitants of Canaan federated with the He- 
brews, and the Kenites were the branch of the Mid- 
ianites, according to tradition, to which Moses' 
father-in-law belonged. 

The laws have shown some of the characteristics 
of this remarkable religion of Jehovah. Of course 
it developed as time went on; religions always do. 
Its basis was very simple. It was, Jehovah is the 
only God for Israel to worship. " Thou shalt have 
no other gods before me." 

In the ancient world there were gods for different 
things — " department gods," they are often called. 
There were also, especially in the Semitic lands, 
local gods, lords (Baals) who ruled over a special 
territory. None of these gods ought a Hebrew to 
worship, but only Jehovah. This was not mono- 
theism, the belief that there was only one god. 
That came later in their religion. It was what is 
sometimes called monolatry ; they believed that while 
many gods might exist they should worship only one. 

From this basis come three principles. 

(1) Jehovah has made a covenant with the 
nation. If they will worship only him he will give 
the nation prosperity. A covenant is an agreement 
between two persons each binding himself to do cer- 
tain things. The ancient w r orld used various devices 
to express the covenant; eating together, sprinkling 
the persons with the blood of sacred animals, build- 
ing a pile of stone, setting up a stone pillar, and 



n6 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

especially making a sacrifice and eating together a 
sacrificial feast. The stories we have had have illus- 
trated most of these. 

(2) This religion is national, not individual. 
That was the greatest difference between the early 
Hebrew religion and that of to-day. A person's 
relation to God was only because he was a member 
of the nation. Should one be driven out from his 
nation he could no longer worship this God, for the 
God had nothing to do with foreigners. 

(3) All the laws of the nation are religious. In 
modern times we draw a sharp distinction between 
religious obligations and civil laws. In early times 
men did not. God himself was the ruler, and the 
leaders of the people were his agents. Moses was 
a lawgiver because he was a prophet, and later gen- 
erations said that God spoke to him face to face 
and gave him the laws which "they were to follow 
in all their later history. This type of state is called 
theocracy, government by God, as government by the 
the people is called democracy. 

Moses' feeling that God was really guiding his 
decisions was not merely a temporary emotion, the 
result of religious exaltation among the clouds on 
the Mountain of God. It was a part of his daily 
life. A little apart from the other tents was pitched, 
at each camping place, a " Tent of Meeting." It 
was probably of rough goat's-hair cloth like the 
other tents. It contained the ark, a symbol of the 
presence of Jehovah. This was the place where 
God met his prophet and here Moses went to decide 
cases in the presence of God. The tribes of the 



THE COVENANT OF JEHOVAH 117 

desert often had seers to whom they went " to en- 
quire of God." To both the people and Moses this 
was the natural method of seeking the divine guid- 
ance, and Moses felt that he was not meeting his 
problems in his own strength but in that of God. 
If one realizes the deep conviction in Israel that 
their national God was their national ruler, it clears 
up some things which make the Bible seem strange 
to modern readers. It shows why laws were as- 
cribed to God, why civil problems were referred to 
a religious decision, and why wars and the affairs of 
political history were regarded as directed by God. 

Exodus 20:1-17, Deuteronomy 5:6-21, Two versions 
of the ten commandments. Exodus 34, Another group of 
laws. Exodus 18, Numbers 10:29-32, Moses and his 
father-in-law. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE SECOND STAGE OF THE WILDERNESS JOURNEY 
How an Immature People Were Trained 

Moses had no intention of settling the people in 
the mountains about Sinai. The ravines there were 
no place for the long stay of shepherd clans. So the 
second stage of their experience as free tribes began. 
As they went out on the broad, rolling, gravelly up- 
lands of the Wilderness of Paran, it was in search 
of homes and permanent pasturage. The Hebrews 
were emigrants. 

Our usual picture of the emigrant is the individ- 
ual, or at most the family, going by sea or land to a 
new country where work is waiting to be done or 
open spaces of land to be occupied. The emigration 
is individual. But as a matter of fact most of the 
migrations of the world which have influenced his- 
tory have been what is called folk migrations, where 
whole tribes have set out with flocks and herds, 
women and children, to seek new homes. All early 
migrations were of this sort. It was in this way that 
our own forefathers moved across Europe. The 
migrations of the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth and 
of the Quakers to Philadelphia were essentially of 
the same class, but most of the later migrations to 
America have been individual. 

118 



SECOND STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 119 

So the movement of Israel was a folk migration 
of a loosely organized group of tribes in search of 
a new home. It had two advantages over many 
such migrations; first, it had a leader of great genius 
and determination and, second, it was like that of the 
Pilgrims and Quakers, under a religious inspiration, 
a feeling that God guided their actions. It had one 
great disadvantage; the people were a poor stock. 
Their fathers who came into Egypt would have been 
good material for such migration, but the long life 
in the warm lands by the Nile had unfitted them 
mentally and physically for desert hardships. All 
the rest of Moses' life was one long struggle to make 
a nation out of this undisciplined mob. Sometimes 
he even despaired of accomplishing it. 

Tradition said that from the first the Hebrews 
planned to go to Palestine, the land from which their 
forefathers had come. Stories of their life there 
had been told from generation to generation in the 
homes of Egypt, as stories of the old country so 
often are, and they believed that their God would 
lead them back. Doubtless they expected soon to 
enter this promised land and turned toward Pales- 
tine from Sinai and moved on as rapidly as possible. 

How could they be sure that Jehovah would go 
with them? They had visited his shrine. They 
had seen clouds and lightnings and heard peals of 
thunder over his sacred mountain. Evidently he 
was there. It may be, as some think, that Jehovah 
was originally a god of storms who lived on this 
mountain; at any rate, he was thought to be on 
this mountain more really than he was elsewhere. 



120 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

But now they were leaving the mountain, and they 
wanted to take Jehovah with them. How could 
they do it? 

The solution of Moses was the Ark of the Cov- 
enant. This was a box made from such wood as 
was available in the wilderness and ornamented as 
the simple shepherds were able. At some time two 
winged figures, cherubim, were placed on the top, 
making what symbolized to the poets of Israel the 
throne of Jehovah, but possibly at first the box had 
no such elaborate adornment. Perhaps the idea of 
this ark came from a sacred box or chest used in 
connection with worship in Egypt. This box was 
the ark of the covenant because, so the story says, 
the tablets with the law of the covenant were placed 
in it. It was the symbol of Jehovah's presence with 
Israel. Wherever it went, Jehovah went, and wher- 
ever it rested, there Jehovah stayed. It was kept 
in the Tent of Meeting, where God gave his de- 
cisions to the people through Moses. 

The moving of the ark was a religious ceremony. 
When they started with it, they sang a prayer : 

Rise up, O Jehovah, 

And make thine enemies to flee, 

And let them fly that hate thee. 

When they set it down they sang: 

Return, O Jehovah, 
And bless the myriads 
Of Israel's clans. 

It was the symbol of the highest things in their 



SECOND STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 121 

nation, like the flag in modern times, or like the 
standard of the emperor which every Roman soldier 
was proud to defend. All the national and religious 
sentiment of the people gathered about it. 

The life of the Hebrews in the wilderness was 
probably much like that of the Arab tribes in the 
same region to-day. They lived in rough tents of 
goat's hair, each clan forming a little encampment 
and the whole body keeping as near together as the 
need for pasturage permitted. The thin vegeta- 
tion was soon exhausted at one place and they moved 
elsewhere. Their food was, in the main, curds 
from the milk of their flocks with now and then a 
little addition from the hunt. It was a rough, hard 
life, but good discipline for them. 

In this period of their journey are placed a 
few traditions which show the people in various 
moods and which throw light on the problems of 
Moses. One story shows complaint once more 
about the food supply. They were tired of its mon- 
otony and wanted meat. " We remember the abun- 
dance of fish we could get for almost nothing in 
Egypt," they said; then they trailed off into the mem- 
ory of all the good things they used to eat. " You 
remember," they said to each other, " the cucum- 
bers and the melons and the leeks and the onions 
and the garlic. And now our very life is starved out 
of us. We are sick of this manna." Their memory 
was correct. Even slaves in Egypt could have all 
the fish and vegetables they wanted. But they were 
in no danger of starvation. They were living quite 
as well as any of the tribes of the desert, only they 



i22 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

wanted variety, and that is what the desert tribes 
had to learn to do without. 

They blamed Moses, as though he had done them 
an injury in liberating them. He went to the Tent 
of Meeting and appealed to God. " They demand 
that I give them flesh to eat. What can I do? The 
burden of this people is too heavy. I can not bear 
it." Moses was thoroughly discouraged. 

That very night a wind sprang up, and with it 
came quails from the south. All that day and the 
night following and the next day the people gathered 
quails. For once the people had all the meat they 
wanted, and so greedily did they gorge themselves 
that sickness fell on the camp and many died. In 
this way tradition accounted for the name of a place 
in the wilderness called The Graves of the Greedy, 
Kibroth-hattaavah. 

The story is fully in accord with the migration of 
quails. They winter in Africa, and in the spring 
fly across the desert to Palestine in large numbers. 

Another tradition is of the selection of seventy 
men to help Moses bear his burdens. Even with 
the help of the judges whom his father-in-law had 
suggested he needed further aid. He gathered them 
at the Tent of Meeting, and then, in the primitive 
phrase of the early story, God came down in the 
cloud and took some of the spirit of prophecy from 
Moses and put it on them; as though the spirit of 
God were a coat which could be put off and on. 
Then occurred one of those little turns which show 
the real character of men. A young man came run- 
ning out to the Tent and reported that upon two 



SECOND STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 123 

men in the camp had also fallen the prophetic gift. 
Joshua appealed to Moses to forbid them. " Are 
you jealous for me? " said he. " Would God that 
all Jehovah's people were prophets.'' It was the 
answer of an unselfish, generous-souled man, who 
cared more about the good of the people than about 
his own dignity. 

Again there came a time when they had to en- 
camp without water. The Amalekites, a wild tribe 
of the desert, had camped about the spring at Reph- 
idim and were ready to fight for its possession. 
The Hebrews had not yet learned the first lesson of 
desert life, to endure thirst patiently and husband all 
strength for the journey to the next spring. They 
made such a mutiny that Moses was afraid of being 
stoned. " What shall I do to this people?" he 
cried to God. Then God told him, so tradition 
said, to smite a rock, and water came from it. A 
curious legend arose that this rock, with its spring of 
water, followed them in all their journey. Paul 
alludes to this quaint belief in 1 Cor. 10: 4. 

The Hebrews could not live long nor travel far 
in the desert without being challenged by the tribes 
who held the springs and pastures. Poor country 
as it was, every oasis and spring was claimed by 
some tribe. The Amalekites proposed to try out 
the power of this new people in battle. There was 
nothing for Israel to do but fight. The leadership 
was given to the young man who had charge of 
the Tent of Meeting, Joshua, of whom we shall later 
hear much. Victory, however, was ascribed by tra- 
dition to Jehovah. The men could lift up their 



i2 4 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

eyes from the battle-field and see the figure of their 
sheik Moses standing on a hill-top, his hands raised 
in prayer to Jehovah. After their victory Moses 
built an altar and called it " Jehovah is my banner. n 

This battle was the beginning of vigorous national 
self-assertion. No nation deserves liberty unless it 
is willing to fight for it. 

The writer of Numbers puts in this period a tale 
of a sordid family quarrel. Miriam and Aaron — 
principally Miriam, the story implies — became jeal- 
ous of their greater brother. Perhaps the explana- 
tion was that as Moses' wife Zipporah had recently 
come to him, as told in the last chapter, Miriam 
was no longer the most important woman of the 
camp. The result was an attack on the leadership 
of Moses. " Has not God spoken by us also?" 
she said. Moses, being the meekest man in all the 
world, did not attempt to defend his dignity, but 
God gave an oracle. 

Hearken now to my words: 

If there be a prophet among you, 

In visions do I make myself known to him, 

In dreams do I speak with him, 

Not so with my servant Moses ; 

In all my house he showed himself trustworthy. 

Mouth to mouth do I speak with him, 

Plainly and not in riddles, 

And the form of Jehovah doth he behold. 

Why then did ye not fear 

To speak against my servant Moses. 1 

Leprosy came upon Miriam as a punishment until 

1 Translation of Gray, International Critical Commentary, Num- 
bers, New York, 1903, p. 124. 



SECOND STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 125 

Moses, with characteristic kindliness, prayed for her 
forgiveness. 

This group of tales shows the people undisci- 
plined, unreasonable, childish, but beginning to learn 
the lessons which life teaches; and Moses, lonely, 
discouraged, almost ready at times to give up, but 
generous and forgiving and, in spite of his difficulties, 
keeping to his work. 

Exodus 33:7-11, The Tent of Meeting. Numbers 10: 
33-36, Deuteronomy 10: 1-5, I Samuel 4: 1-11, The Ark 
and its uses. Numbers 11, More discontent about food. 
Numbers 12, A Revolt against Moses. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

IN THE CAMP AT KADESH 
The Invasion that Failed 

The successful fight with the Amalekites gave the 
Hebrews a standing in the country. They were able 
to take possession of one of the largest and best 
watered oases in the region, called Kadesh. It lies 
in a narrow valley extending east and west. On the 
north is a ridge of high hills, beyond which lies the 
rolling plateau. On the south lower hills border 
the desert. Several large springs of water break 
out. Fig trees grow here and a little care would 
make the valley a garden of fertility. It is the 
largest oasis in all that thirsty land below the hills 
of Palestine and the fact that the Hebrews could 
hold it is a tribute to their military strength. At 
best, however, the life of the wilderness was a life 
of hardship. It involved long journeys for pastur- 
age, poor fare and perpetual watchfulness against 
the jealous tribes of wild Arabs about them. They 
had no idea of making a permanent home in the 
wilderness. 

Hebron was about 70 miles, Beersheba about 50 
miles north of Kadesh. Between lay only an open 
rolling country, becoming more fertile as one pro- 
ceeded northward. To the people of the half desert 
region of Paran it would seem a land of luxurious 

126 



IN THE CAMP AT KADESH 127 

pastures. Flocks could there feed anywhere, springs 
were more numerous than in Paran, and in the 
northern part the gravel gave way to fruitful soil 
and fields of grain were frequent in the valleys. 
The Hebrew shepherds, searching out a little pas- 
ture here and a little there on the gravelly uplands, 
began to plot an invasion of that richer limestone 
region. Moses favored the plan, and they set about 
the business in orderly fashion. Moses sent a 
group of men to spy out the land. Probably they 
were to appearance simply a group of traders, driv- 
ing asses laden with wool; such traders as all the 
tribes of the desert frequently send out to the towns. 
One still sees such groups of desert Arabs trading in 
the bazaars of Hebron and Jerusalem. 

Material from the three collections of stories is 
woven together in the account in Numbers. The 
late priestly version regards the spies as twelve in 
number, representing the tribes, names Joshua 
among them, and considers that they went through 
all the land to the very northern boundary of later 
Israel. The earlier form of the story narrates a 
much more modest trip, fitting far better into the 
probabilities of a journey of shepherd traders. It 
makes their journey end with Hebron, the largest 
town and the natural market of the southern bor- 
derland of Canaan. Hebron lay on a hill over- 
looking a narrow valley and controlling the main 
road to the north. The region about was very 
fertile. More than a score of springs broke out in 
the hills near by and all the land was green with 
gardens and vineyards and olive orchards. 



i28 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

The Hebrews wandered about the fruitful fields 
and bargained with the merchants in the bazaars 
where they sold their wool and bought cloth and 
grain to take back, and gathered all the information 
they could meantime. This was surely a land to be 
desired; the great question was, could they take it. 
The farther they had come the more doubtful they 
had grown. When they stood at the gates of He- 
bron and looked up at its massive walls; when they 
thought of the other towns they had passed or heard 
of along the way, the land seemed, after the empty 
spaces of the wilderness, to be teeming with popula- 
tion and protected by strongholds. The men too 
were great, stalwart creatures, a veritable race of 
giants. The poor traders from the desert were de- 
pressed. An invasion seemed hopeless. It was at 
the beginning of the grape harvest and they bought 
some of the fruits of the fertile fields to show at 
home — among others, tradition said, a bunch of 
grapes from the valley of Eschol (the Cluster) so 
large that two men carried it on a pole between them 
— and some pomegranates and some figs, and went 
back to the camp at Kadesh. 

Their report was not unanimous. " The land is 
good," they all said. " The fruit we brought back 
shows that. But the cities are walled, and very 
large. We saw the gigantic sons of Anak there." 
One of the spies, Caleb, said, " Nevertheless, let us 
go up at once. We are well able to take the land." 
The others said, " There is no use in trying it. 
The cities have walls as high as heaven, and all the 
people are very tall. We saw giants there before 



IN THE CAMP AT KADESH 129 

whom we were no bigger than grasshoppers. " 
Their statements were evidently colored by their 
imagination. 

The people had been dreaming of going into a 
land of an easier life, and this discouraging report 
was too much for their still unstable discipline. 
They turned on Moses. " We had better have died 
in Egypt," they said, and they began to plot a 
mutiny. They would appoint another leader and 
go back to Egypt. If Moses had hoped that the 
people were now ready to win new homes and better 
conditions by daring a warfare with the peoples of 
South Canaan, he was disappointed. They were 
not even willing to made a trial at the loosely held 
lands on the borders. They might as well go back 
to the lands of his kinsmen the Midianites toward 
the eastern gulf of the Red Sea. He resolved that 
they should lose no time, but start the next day. 

Then the people turned again. All night they sat 
in their tents bewailing the situation, and in the 
morning announced that they were ready to go up 
to fight for the land Jehovah had promised them. 
But it was too late. Moses could not be deceived 
by this tardy assumption of bravery. The decisions 
had been the results of contagious panics and the 
people could not hold to them over night. Who 
could know what might happen in the test of a 
battle? Moses refused to lead them in an inva- 
sion or to allow the ark to go with them. They 
still foolishly insisted on going. In this hurried 
action the flocks and families were left in Kadesh. 

It was fortunate that they did not abandon Ka- 



i 3 o THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

desh, for the rabble which called itself an army 
never got very far. The Amalekites who claimed 
the region through which they started called in the 
aid of the Amorites about Hebron, and the Hebrews 
were defeated and chased back to their encampment. 

This ended all hope of gaining a foothold in Pal- 
estine for the present. In course of time some of 
the tribes with whom the Hebrews were affiliated, 
like the Kenites, and perhaps some of the Hebrew 
clans themselves, slowly penetrated into the South- 
land and remained there. The majority of the 
clans, however, made no further attempt to reach 
Canaan from the south. 

When the defeated Hebrews straggled back 
weary and wounded, it was no time to strike camp 
and seek other homes. The only thing that could 
be done was to remain for the present at Kadesh, 
where they were so strong that the Amalekites dared 
not attack them. So they stayed on there. In 
time they became contented with the place. They 
were accorded the right to the oasis and the pasture 
lands about, as is the custom among the shepherd 
tribes, and seem to have held it without further 
attack. 

They remained at Kadesh for upwards of a gener- 
ation. The people were gaining in numbers and in 
power. The boys and girls grew up to the shep- 
herd life with its strict duties, its simple fare, its 
stern hardships, its constant watchfulness. They be- 
came a generation of pioneers. They did not sigh 
for cucumbers and garlic, like their fathers. They 
were content with curds and a handful of dates. Such 



IN THE CAMP AT KADESH 131 

people are excellent material for the foundation of 
a nation. Meantime Moses was the great sheik 
of all the clans. He was both their civil and reli- 
gious leader. He trained them in obedience to the 
Law of the Covenant till the most real thing in their 
life was their God. To him is due the fact that 
Israel had the germs of a better and more efficient 
religion than any other of the nations of the old 
world. 

The life at Kadesh was mostly without incident, 
filled with the monotonous round of shepherd life. 
It is not surprising that the Hebrews preserved few 
stories of their Kadesh life; there were few to be 
preserved. One tradition, however, may be placed 
in the earlier years at Kadesh. It shows, the char- 
acteristics of the earlier generation which so often 
broke out in mutiny against Moses. 

In the tribe of Reuben two men, Dathan and 
Abiram, set up a revolt. When Moses summoned 
them they sent a scornful refusal. " Is it not enough 
that you brought us out of a land of good living, but 
you must now set yourself up as a prince over all 
the tribes?" They were still harping on the fish 
and vegetables of Egypt. " Where is your prom- 
ised land, flowing with milk and honey? Where are 
the fields and vineyards you were going to give us. 
We will not come to you." This was the most dar- 
ing attempt yet made at a revolt. It only won a 
few followers and tradition said that the earth itself 
opened and swallowed them up. At any rate the re- 
bellion disastrously failed, as it deserved to fail. 
As demagogues often do, its leaders tried to play 



132 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

on popular discontent and used catchwords about the 
good old times, but most of the people had learned 
wisdom and supported the leadership of Moses. 

Numbers 13, 14, The account of the spies. Deuteron- 
omy 1: 19-46, Another account of the spies. Numbers 16, 
A second revolt against Moses. 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE THIRD STAGE OF THE WILDERNESS JOURNEY 

How They Left Kadesh and Began the Conquest of 
a New Home 

Moses led one more attempt to win a home in 
Canaan for his people. The pasture lands cen- 
tering about Kadesh were becoming too small for 
the growing flocks. They must find room for 
growth. They could not expand into the territory 
on either side because their neighbors were hostile. 

When the Hebrews, looking back from a later 
time, told the stories of their ancestors, they did not 
dwell on these motives so much as on another. God, 
they believed, had promised them the land of 
Canaan. It was a religious movement. Moses 
was so conscious of the presence of God that all 
plans for the progress of the people were to him 
God's plans; so when the time seemed ripe for a 
migration from Kadesh the facts of the situation 
were to him a command of God. 

Even yet they did not dare to enter Canaan from 
the south. The only other plan was to go far 
around to the east and find out what could be done 
beyond the Jordan north of the Dead Sea. Possi- 
bly their plans only went as far as a home in the 
great grassy regions which stretch east of the Jor- 
dan Valley. The most direct way to this land would 

133 



134 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

have been northeast across the deep, hot valley just 
south of the Dead Sea, then up the steep heights to 
a broad plateau held by the Moabites. There were 
two objections to this road. One was that the first 
part was through a desert so barren and waterless 
that caravans with flocks of sheep and women and 
children would find it almost impossible to cross. 
The other objection was that the plain of Moab was 
held by a strong people with fortified towns who 
might not welcome a great, straggling crowd from 
the desert. 

There was another way straight east through the 
range called Mount Seir. This was occupied by 
the Edomites, a tribe belonging to the same stock 
as the Hebrews, and the Hebrews could not hope to 
go through the rocky, winding ravines without their 
permission. That permission the Edomites refused 
to give, and the Hebrews had to give up hope of 
this route. Whether because of this ungracious act 
or for some other reason, the Hebrews had a long 
feud with the Edomites. 

The only other route was a long one. They 
must go to the south till they came near Elath at 
the head of the eastern gulf of the Red Sea, then 
turn north up the caravan route on the east of the 
Mountains of Seir. This took them entirely around 
Edom. It was more than twice as long, but it was 
the only road open to them. 

So they struck their tents, set the ark once more 
in the front of the caravan, and moved slowly away 
from Kadesh over the slope of the southern hills 
into the wilderness; and by the next day the Amale- 



THIRD STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 135 

kites had swarmed like flies down over the moun- 
tains from the north and up the valley from the 
west, rejoicing that once more these splendid springs 
were theirs. 

The latest tradition placed the death of Aaron on 
this journey. Unable to endure, at his age, the hard- 
ships of the journey, he died and was buried, as the 
Arabs still sometimes bury their chiefs, on a neigh- 
boring mountain top named Hor, a peak of the 
Mount Seir range. 

Even these shepherds, reared to lead the sheep in 
the lonely wastes, found unexpected hardships. 
Moses and his God are held to blame for them. 
u Why did you ever bring us out? " they complained. 
' There is no bread and no water, and we loathe 
the vile food we have to eat." When they came 
soon after into a region infested with poisonous 
snakes they regarded the reptiles as Jehovah's punish- 
ment and repented their rash words. Long after- 
wards there was the brazen image of a serpent kept 
in the temple at Jerusalem, and this was the story 
told about it: When the people were attacked by 
serpents in the wilderness Moses made this image 
and put it on a pole in the camp, that whoever was 
bitten might look on it and live. Perhaps the 
prophets of Jehovah did not believe this tradition, 
or perhaps they thought that even an ancient relic 
ought not to be kept if it was worshiped; at any 
rate, they had it destroyed in the time of Hezekiah, 
who made a reform under their influence (II Kings 
18:1-4). 

At last the long loop to the south was completed. 



136 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

The Hebrews were east of their old home in Kadesh, 
but on the other side of the mountain range. They 
had taken a long and hard journey but they had kept 
the peace with Edom. Now they proposed to keep 
the peace with another kindred race, the Moabites, 
who held the high plateau just east of the Dead Sea, 
and they bore to the east of Moab where the fertile 
land shades off into the desert. 

They were on a wide plateau, in its highest por- 
tions over two thousand feet above the sea. A 
gorge cuts down through it where Arnon flows into 
the deep valley of the Dead Sea. It is like the 
larger side canons which cut into a great canon of 
the west, such as the Grand Canon of the Colorado. 
When the Hebrews reached this region, their wild- 
erness wandering was over. They were where, at 
least a part of the year, streams gurgled and tumbled 
down the sides of the ravines and all the land was 
green with fresh springing grass. On the plains be- 
tween the valleys they came to a place called Beer, 
" The Well," and here, in the joy of the watered 
land, tradition said that a song arose, a " chanty," 
long sung while they drew water from wells at the 
close of the day. 

" Spring up, O Well! Sing ye to it! 
To the well which the princes dug, 
Which the nobles of the people delved, 
With the leader's wand, with their staves. " 

Perhaps the last line refers to some ceremony 
when the sheiks opened the well in the name of the 
tribes. 




Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 
A Shepherd Camp on the Hills East of the Jordan 



THIRD STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 137 

Soon they were over the Valley of Arnon, on the 
southern edge of a fertile country, very different 
from the wastes they had held about Kadesh. As 
a matter of fact they were now within the borders 
of their permanent home. 

Now it happened that this region north of Arnon 
had recently been over-run and conquered. The 
Moabites had formerly held it as far as the Jabbok, 
the next valley to the north, but some of the Am- 
orites, one of the races which had crowded into the 
hills west of the Jordan, had pushed east and driven 
the Moabites back south of the Arnon. Numbers 
preserves an old war-song, mentioning this conquest, 
and taunting the victors with their speedy defeat by 
Israel. If the Amorites were attacked they certainly 
could not expect help from their neighbors of Moab; 
and the Hebrews knew it and acted accordingly. 
They asked Sihon the Amorite king for permission 
to pass through his territory. He refused, as had 
the Edomites. He gathered his clans to meet them, 
but this agricultural people were no match for the 
stout limbed, toughened hordes from the desert. 
The Hebrews were victorious, captured the chief 
city and swarmed over the land. 

The Moabites watched the movements of this in- 
vasion with hostile eyes. They were glad enough 
to see the Amorites driven out but not at all pleased 
that this vigorous people, under an experienced old 
leader like Moses, took the land which a little while 
before had belonged to them. They may have been 
still weakened by the Amorite conquest; for some 
reason they did not care to cross the valleys of the 



1 38 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

Arnon and attack the Hebrews. They knew a bet- 
ter way than that. 

In some foreign land — one form of the story 
makes it the country by the Euphrates, across the 
Syrian desert — lived a famous magician named 
Balaam. He was thought to be so powerful that 
his curse or his blessing would make or mar a whole 
people. Balak, the king of Moab, sent to this seer 
and said, " Come and curse Israel for me." Now 
Balaam was an honest seer who followed visions 
which he believed to come from God; and he said 
to the messengers, " Stay with me to-night, and I 
will tell you what God says." The next morning he 
gave his answer. " No. God will not let me go 
with you," and the messengers went home. 

Soon other messengers arrived, important chiefs 
from the Moabite clans, and urged him to come and 
curse Israel. Balak thought that he had not of- 
fered a large enough fee and he suggested that 
Balaam might name his own price. " Not for a 
houseful of silver and gold would I go against the 
word of God," said the seer, " but — stay to-night 
and we will see," and the next morning he said God 
had given him permission to go. 

The chiefs set off early in the morning and the 
seer followed at leisure, riding on his ass, as did 
men of substance and dignity in the ancient East. 
And here comes in a bit of folk-lore of the sort that 
is common all over the world. As Balaam rode 
on in a narrow path between vineyard walls his ass 
shied and finally lay down under him. When he 



THIRD STAGE OF THE JOURNEY 139 

beat her, she began to talk to him and Balaam replied 
with as little suprise as if his ass were accustomed 
to discuss matters with him. Then God opened 
Balaam's eyes, and he saw what the ass had seen, an 
angel in the way, who warned him that he must speak 
only what God permitted regarding Israel. 

Balaam is taken to a shrine on the border of Moab 
from whence he can see part of the extended camp 
of Israel. The seer goes to a rocky height to re- 
ceive his message. He comes back and recites an 
oracle, but lo ! it is a blessing instead of a curse. 

" How can I curse whom God has not cursed? 
How can I defy whom God has not defied? 
Who can count the dust of Jacob? 
Who can number the myriads of Israel? " 

Balak, disappointed, takes him to another height, 
and again Balaam goes alone to receive his mes- 
sage; this time even more definitely a blessing on 
Israel. Once again in another place the oracle is 
a blessing instead of a curse; and each time Balaam 
protests to the king that he can only say what God 
puts in his mouth. At last Balak dismisses the seer 
with anger, and he responds with still another oracle, 
predicting a future conquest of Moab by Israel. 

11 There shall come forth a star out of Jacob, 
And a scepter shall rise out of Israel, 
And shall smite through the temples of Moab, 
And break down the pride of the haughty." 

Such was the story of Balaam as told in the tra- 



140 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

ditions of Israel. It is a splendid story of the care 
of God who makes even a foreign seer fulfil his 
will for Israel. 

Numbers 20:14-21:32, The journey around Edom. 
Numbers 22, 24, The story of Balaam. Psalms 105, 106, 
136: 10-22, The great events of this period as later poets 
saw them. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE LAST DAYS OF MOSES 
How the Hebrews Found Homes East of the Jordan 

The traditional life of the great leader of early 
Israel divided into four parts. In the first he was 
a youth in the court of Pharaoh, with the memories 
of his humbler early Hebrew home. In the sec- 
ond, he was a shepherd in the desert of north Arabia. 
In the third he was the leader of Israel in the long 
years of wilderness life, gradually training a race 
of men who should be strong enough to gain for 
themselves a home in a better land than the barren 
desert. The fourth part was much briefer than 
either of the others. It was the period of the con- 
quest of the territory east of the Jordan. It began 
with the defeat of Sihon king of the Amorites, and 
lasted till the death of the aged leader. It was the 
crown of Moses' life. 

The story of the conquest of the Amorites and 
why they could get no help from their Moabite 
neighbors was told in the last chapter. The region 
of which the Amorites had gained control, as said 
there, was the country lying between the deep val- 
leys of the Arnon on the south and the Jabbok on 
the north. The western part of this land was well 
watered and fertile, the eastern, gradually changing 

141 



142 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

into the desert. The southern portion was a part 
of the plain of Moab. That plain has always been 
a grain producing section. It is still at some por- 
tions of the year a common sight to see long trains 
of mules crossing the Jordan laden with wheat from 
these plains. 

This has always been a land of sheep. While 
grain was raised, the great wealth of the land lay in 
its flocks. The whole plain is about fifty miles long 
by twenty or thirty broad, but the most fertile part 
was only ten or twelve miles across. The southern 
part of the plain of Moab was never held by the 
Hebrews, but always by the Moabites, while the 
northern part, then conquered by Israel from the 
Amorites, went back again later under the power of 
Moab. It shifted between the two nations as each 
was the stronger, somewhat as Alsace and Lorraine 
have shifted between France and Germany. 

The kingdom of King Sihon reached farther north 
than the plain country, into a region of low hills and 
fertile slopes, to the next deep valley, the Jabbok, on 
whose banks tradition said Jacob had wrestled with 
Jehovah. Sihon met the invaders at Jazer, prob- 
ably somewhere on the southern border. In a 
whirlwind dash, such as the tribes from the desert 
have frequently made upon the more disciplined 
armies of the settlers, the Hebrews won the day and 
swept over the plain to the north, summoning the 
towns to surrender. There was probably no mass- 
acre of the people. All the Hebrews wanted, for 
the present at least, was undisturbed pasturage and 
water and freedom from danger of attack. 



THE LAST DAYS OF MOSES 143 

The earliest tradition says that they took Sihon's 
capital, Heshbon, and the towns round about and 
dwelt in them. This probably does not mean that 
all the Hebrews abandoned their black tents to live 
in stone houses, though many may have done so. 
Most of them became semi-nomads, feeding their 
flocks within a certain section of the country and 
camping at the places where the pasturage was best 
at different seasons of the year. It was an easy 
step to leave the tent and live in a village, though 
to this day some of the tribes in this region cling to 
the tent life. It was also an easy step to the occupa- 
tion of farming, and the agricultural life of Israel 
began here east of the Jordan. 

When the Hebrews told their tales of these an- 
cient times they coupled with the defeat of Sihon, 
king of the Amorites, the conquest of Og, king of 
Bashan, but the account of that campaign is very 
meager. North of the Jabbok lies a hilly country, 
in those days and long afterwards heavily wooded, a 
land of green trees and running brooks, very differ- 
ent from the open, treeless plains of Moab. The 
traveler passed through great forests of oak and in 
the valleys were vineyards and orchards of pome- 
granate and olives, while the plains into which the 
valleys spread out here and there contained fields of 
grain. This hilly country and the land of lower 
hills south of the Jabbok and north of the plains of 
Moab was called Gilead. In later times it was al- 
ways held by Israel, no matter who held the plains on 
the south. 

North and east of Gilead lay again a plain, sloping 



144 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

away to the desert on the east and to the distant 
regions of Damascus on the north. This was called 
Bashan, perhaps meaning " The Fertile. " Its black 
volcanic soil was very rich, growing grain abundantly 
when the hordes of desert tribes allowed it peace, but 
its great reputation was for its breed of big cattle. 
11 Bulls of Bashan, " the Hebrews said when they 
wanted to symbolize strength and power. 

Tradition said that at this time a king named Og 
ruled Bashan, and a fragment of a story is copied in 
Numbers 21:33-35 telling how the Hebrews de- 
feated his army and took his land. He was said to 
have been the last of an ancient race of giants, the 
Rephaim, and at a city of Gilead there was what was 
called Og's bed, about twelve feet long by six wide 
— fit for a giant indeed ! It is very likely a sarco- 
phagus cut from the black basaltic rock of the region, 
such as exist to the present day in that land and are 
sometimes used as watering troughs at the springs. 

From these scraps of tradition we can reconstruct 
the last efforts of Moses to gain a home for his 
people. Having obtained the kingdom of Sihon, 
they were dangerous neighbors for the people who 
held the land to the north, and were soon attacked. 
Again the Hebrews were victors, took the capital of 
Og and spread through the hills of Gilead and over 
the plain of Bashan. All the land east of the Jordan 
was now theirs from half way down the Dead Sea to 
the Sea of Galilee and from the Jordan to the edge 
of the desert. However long this may have taken, 
the Hebrews, in their stories of the old time, assigned 
it all to the days before the death of Moses. 



THE LAST DAYS OF MOSES 145 

One more war is recorded. No nation has held 
this country long without being obliged to defend it 
from tribes which swept in from the desert, as did 
the Hebrews themselves, and the last war of the 
story of Moses was with Arab raiders, Midianites. 
Israel drove them back in defeat, and the Hebrew 
possession of the country was for the present 
secure. 

So at last Israel had a permanent home in a 
fertile land. Some of the tribes were quite satisfied 
with this excellent land and never moved across the 
river. There was doubtless room enough for them 
all at first, and for some time they lived there, be- 
coming stronger and more able to take their place 
among the settled nations of Syria. 

To the end of his life Moses was their leader in 
war and in peace. Since he had been a lawgiver for 
a generation it is altogether likely that the earliest 
laws of the new conditions came from him. Tradi- 
tion tried to explain why he was not permitted to 
go one step farther and lead the people across the 
Jordan. The only answer they could find was that 
he must have offended God. (Num. 20: 10-13.) 
They naturally thought that he must have longed to 
cross the Jordan, but perhaps he did not. He may 
have been content with the success which crowned his 
life in winning the east country. 

The earliest stories had little to say about the 
close of his life, but later traditions picture it vividly. 
They tell how Moses called Joshua to the Tent of 
Meeting and, in a solemn ceremony, appointed him 
his successor. He bade him be strong and of a good 



146 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

courage and lead the people over Jordan. Then the 
aged leader took his lonely way up to Pisgah, a pro- 
jection on the western edge of the plateau they had 
won from the Amorites. It is a headland running 
out from the plain and looking down over the valley 
of the Jordan, just at the head of the Dead Sea. 
Across the deep gorge of the Jordan lie the hills of 
central Palestine and on clear days Mount Hermon, 
the great mountain at the north of Palestine, can be 
seen. One of the high points of this ridge still bears 
the name of Neba, from the Mount Nebo where 
Moses viewed the land he was not allowed to enter. 
He never came back to the camp. He had gone up 
to meet God, as long ago he had met Him on the 
mountain in the wilderness; and there, alone with 
his God, he died on the mountain, and no man knows 
where he is buried to this day. It is a sublime and 
fitting end for the splendid story of a great prophet. 
Moses made a deeper impression on the memory 
of Israel than any other man. He found the 
Hebrews an undisciplined mob and made them a 
nation. He was a lawgiver who laid down principles 
that developed into one of the best systems of law 
in the ancient world. He was a prophet who taught 
religious ideals which made the Hebrews' conception 
of God and of morals the basis of the highest modern 
civilization. At the same time he was a man of 
very human impulses, with moods of depression and 
of hopefulness, with bitter disappointments and 
brilliant successes. He succeeded because, in spite 
of mistakes and failures, he clung to his ideals until 



THE LAST DAYS OF MOSES 147 

others also were won to accept them and were per- 
suaded to live by them. 

Deuteronomy 3:1-22, Numbers 21:33-35, Conquests 
east of the Jordan. Deuteronomy 3: 23-29, 34: 1-12, The 
close of Moses' life. 



CHAPTER XXI 

JOSHUA THE WARRIOR 
How a Resourceful Leader Began a Great Campaign 

When the wonderful tales of the conquest of Pal- 
estine west of the Jordan were told in northern 
Israel they centered about a warrior, Joshua, as the 
tales of the journey from Egypt had centered about 
Moses. The tales as told in Judah had very little 
about him. Joshua was the leader of Ephraim, a 
large tribe which settled on the central hills north 
of Judah and south of the plain of Esdraelon. The 
conquest of all the country came in time to be as- 
signed to him by the Ephraimites. 

It may be that Joshua's conquest was neither so 
rapid nor so universal as the tales about him imply. 
It is natural for popular estimate to enlarge the work 
of a hero and forget that anything was done in his 
time which he did not do. If we lived in a period 
when the knowledge of the past rested on oral tradi- 
tions it is very possible that all the victories of the 
American Revolution might soon be assigned to 
Washington and all those of the Civil War to Gen- 
eral Grant. 

One is not surprised, then, to find fragments of the 
story of the conquest as told in Judah narrating a 
slower and less sweeping victory and telling of cam- 

148 



JOSHUA THE WARRIOR 149 

paigns which Joshua did not lead. Judah absorbed 
some of the tribes in the south of the country, and 
so it contained people whose ancestors never came 
across the Jordan under Joshua. 

How long the Hebrews were satisfied to stay east 
of the Jordan we cannot tell. The traditions imply, 
though they do not say, that the people crossed the 
Jordan soon after the death of Moses, but later 
memory may have shortened the time. It was long 
enough, at any rate, for part of the people to be- 
come so thoroughly fixed in their life that they did 
not care to leave the good land in the hills of Gilead 
and the plains of Bashan. Reuben, Gad and part 
of Manasseh kept their abode on the east of the 
Jordan, where the pastures were abundant for the 
many flocks they possessed. Tradition said that 
Moses himself had given them this land. (Num. 

32.) 

Three motives led the Hebrews to leave the east- 
ern land and cross the Jordan. ( 1 ) The belief that 
west Palestine was their land of promise. The 
stories emphasize this motive. " God said, ' Arise, 
go over the Jordan unto the land which I give to 
the children of Israel.' " (2) The need of more 
land. The country east of the Jordan was not large. 
It already had a population of shepherds and farm- 
ers settled from ancient times and the incoming 
Hebrews overcrowded the country. The search for 
more land, had there been no other reason, would 
soon have driven them across the Jordan. (3) The 
weakness of the people of Palestine. The popula- 
tion of the hill country was largely composed of two 



ISO THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

kindred races, the Amorites and Canaanites. Later 
generations remembered a list of other names — 
Hivites and Perizzites and Jebusites — which were 
only divisions of the inhabitants who lived in certain 
sections. Had the people combined they could easily 
have defended themselves from any shepherd in- 
vaders from the desert, but what had happened on 
the east of the Jordan also happened on the west. 
Each section of the country held itself aloof from 
the others. Had Egypt been still in control of the 
land, as it had been in previous centuries, the 
Hebrews could not have gained a footing there ; but 
Egypt had withdrawn her armies and the peoples of 
Palestine had developed no firm government to take 
its place. 

As the traditions were told in northern Israel, 
Joshua had been trained and tested long before the 
death of Moses. He had, while still a young man, 
led the Hebrews in the fight with the Amalekites at 
Rephadim. He had been given charge of the sacred 
Tent of Meeting. A late tradition said that he was 
one of the spies who went from Kadesh to Hebron, 
and that he joined Caleb in urging the people to enter 
Palestine from the South without delay. He was 
already a man of age and experience, with a long, 
hard training behind him, before he became the cap- 
tain of Israel's armies. 

Once more, as from Kadesh, spies were sent into 
Palestine. Two men, perhaps going with some car- 
avan of merchants, crossed the river and entered 
Jericho. They came back after three days saying 
that they had had a narrow escape, but that the 



JOSHUA THE WARRIOR 151 

people were in panic at the prospect of a Hebrew 
invasion, and that they had found treachery in the 
city itself. " God has given the land into our 
hands," they said. " The people's courage melts 
before us." 

We can fancy with what eagerness the summons 
ran through the camps of the Hebrews. Down they 
came from the plains of the east and out of the 
valleys of Gilead, driving their flocks with them. 
For three days they camped near the Jordan. It 
was in the spring, when the river was flooded from 
the melting snows on the mountains to the north and 
from the winter rains. There it lay before them, 
a broad stretch of muddy water. The road leading 
to the ford passed through a tangle of bushes, and 
the water swirled in and out of the thick undergrowth 
at the sides. The ford is easy in low water, when 
loaded donkeys can be driven over, but at the time 
of flood it is another matter. Then, as the oldest 
tradition told the story, a surprising thing happened. 
The water began to lower till at last the river ran 
dry. The story had it that the people had actually 
prepared to cross, the ark going before, and that 
when the feet of the men bearing the ark touched the 
brink the waters began to recede. The people 
hastened to cross, and the ark was kept in the middle 
of the bed of the river until all had gone over. 
Then those who bore it came up and the river ran 
full again. 

This version of the story gives an explanation of 
what had happened. Far up the river, at a place 
called Adam (Red Earth), whose site is not known, 



152 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

the river had been held back while the waters below, 
running down, left the bed of the stream dry. The 
explanation suggests what is said by Arabic his- 
torians to have happened in 1257 A. D., during the 
wars of the crusades. Over the Jordan was at that 
time a bridge by which a retreating Moslem army 
wished to cross, for the river was in flood. The 
bridge needed repair and while the army waited the 
river, to their surprise, ran dry. Men were hur- 
riedly set to work at the repairs and a horseman was 
sent up the stream to find the cause of this strange 
event. He brought back word that the high water 
had undermined a steep bank which had fallen and 
dammed up the river. It may be that something of 
the sort furnished aid to the Hebrews. 

Whatever the explanation, the event made Joshua 
and the people sure that Jehovah was on their side. 
If Joshua took advantage of the unexpected lowering 
of the flooded river he showed here the same readi- 
ness to take advantage of a new situation which 
Moses showed at the Red Sea. In later times there 
was a pile of stones on the plain of the Jordan at 
Gilgal which were said to have been brought from 
the bottom of the empty river and laid up here for 
a memorial. 

The camp of the people spread out over the plain 
which reached up the Jordan Valley from the Dead 
Sea. The southern part of the plain was salt and 
sandy but about Jericho it was fertile and full of 
fruits and crops of grain. Jericho was called The 
City of Palmtrees, from the orchards of date palms 
about it. The tropic heat of the deep valley made 




Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 
The Plain of the Jordan, Looking Southeast from the Ruins of 
Ancient Jericho. The Upper End of the Dead Sea Can Be Seen 
at the Extreme Right. 



JOSHUA THE WARRIOR 153 

it a garden spot, but the same tropic climate weak- 
ened and enervated its inhabitants, so that they had 
no mind to fight with the more vigorous peoples from 
the hills. " Jericho never stood a siege, and her in- 
habitants were always running away," says a modern 
scholar. 1 

But to Joshua and his warriors the city presented 
a great problem. Its high brick walls loomed up be- 
fore them, above the surrounding orchards, and 
blocked their road to the hills beyond. The great 
city gates were shut, and so there was no chance to 
try the test of battle. Shepherd tribes have never 
been successful in long sieges, and Joshua was 
puzzled to know how to conquer a city whose people 
would not do him the favor of fighting. 

One day Joshua, alone in the solitary fields, pond- 
ering his problem, had a vision. A man met him 
with a drawn sword in his hand. " Are you for us 
or our enemies? " asked Joshua. " I am the captain 
of Jehovah's host," was the answer. " Put your 
shoes from off your feet, for this is holy ground." 
Joshua came back with a clever stratagem in his 
mind which he believed God himself had given him. 
It was certainly original. He never could have 
gained it from the stories of desert warfare told 
about the Hebrew campfires. 

As the earliest traditions had the story, the people 
marched in solemn silence about the city the first 
day, then filed away to their camp as silently as they 
came. The men of Jericho were puzzled. Was 

1 George Adam Smith. Historical Geography of Palestine, p. 
268, New York, 1894. 



154 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

this some new piece of magic? They did not know 
what to make of it. 

The next day the same thing happened. If this 
was magic, it had no result as yet, and some may 
have begun to feel relieved. The next day again 
there was this same silent march. It might be un- 
canny, or it might be simply absurd, but at any rate 
it was puzzling. The fourth day and the fifth day 
and the sixth day the useless round was made in 
silence. By that time it was an old story. If the 
Hebrews were trying some unknown magic it did 
not work. The people were tired of watching the 
dumb show and probably made their jokes about the 
silly maneuvers of those crazy Hebrews. When the 
monotonous performance began on the seventh day 
we can well suppose that no one paid any attention 
to it, which was exactly what Joshua had hoped. He 
marched as usual, disposed his forces at the points of 
vantage as he pleased, while no one looked over the 
brick walls to see what he was doing. Then they 
shouted the fearsome battle shout, every man rushed 
forward, the gates gave way and the city was taken 
before the people had time to recover from their 
surprise. 

We may be sure that such a marvelous story lost 
nothing in the telling. The later traditions make it 
more elaborate. Each day seven priests blew seven 
trumpets of ram's horn as the procession moved 
about the city; on the seventh day they marched 
about the city seven times, then, at the shout of the 
warriors, the walls fell flat before them and the in- 
habitants were left defenseless. 



JOSHUA THE WARRIOR 155 

Joshua ordered that the city should be " devoted M 
to Jehovah by total destruction. Every living thing 
was killed, and all the city, with its wealth and 
luxuries, burned or taken as an offering to Jehovah. 
Joshua pronounced a curse upon any one rebuilding 
it. So the ruined city was left desolate and grad- 
ually the sand drifted over its walls and covered the 
shapeless piles of brick within, until all that the trav- 
eller can see is a great mound with here and there the 
corner of a brick wall cropping out. Many centuries 
later there was another Jericho in the Jordan Valley, 
but that was built on another site near by. 

Joshua 1, The new leader. Joshua 2, Spies in Jericho. 
Joshua 3, 4, Crossing the Jordan. Joshua 5 : 13-6: 27, The 
capture of Jericho. 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE WAR OF CONQUEST 
The Tale of a Great Campaign 

Three roads ran into the hills from the Jordan 
Valley. One went by a steep, winding ascent to 
Jerusalem. This was shut up to the Hebrews. 
Jerusalem was one of the old walled cities of the 
land, well able to guard the narrow passes which led 
to it. The other road lay to the south and climbed 
up to the hills between Jerusalem and Hebron. The 
third road lay to the north and came out on the hill- 
top at Bethel. 

By this road Joshua purposed to make his first 
invasion of the hills. Summer w T as coming on and he 
had no intention of staying long in the steaming heat 
of the Jordan Valley. 

Far up where the road broke from the ravine onto 
the open hilltops, stood a town, Ai. The Hebrews 
knew this town blocked their next move and sent 
spies to see how it could be taken. The road leads 
from the Jordan plain into a precipitous ravine, then 
breaks over a ridge into another ravine and winds 
up to the open height only a little way from Bethel 
where tradition said Abraham had encamped. The 
town of Ai guarded this height. It was a walled 
town, but much smaller than Jericho. The Hebrew 

156 * 




Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 
The Road from Jericho to Ai Near the Top of the Hill Below Bethel 



THE WAR OF CONQUEST 157 

scouts, in the flush of their easy victory over the 
great city of the plain, despised the little hill town. 
To their minds the long, hot climb from the valley 
was more to be dreaded than the prowess of the few 
warriors holding the little fortress on the hills. 
They came back to the camp and reported. " Do 
not send all the men up," they said. " Two or three 
thousand will be enough. The inhabitants of Ai are 
few. Why should all our army toil up the steeps 
for nothing? " So to be on the safe side Joshua sent 
three thousand, the largest number the scouts had 
mentioned. Careless and secure in their strength, 
they attacked the town but they had a great surprise. 
Doubtless the warriors of Ai knew of the approach 
long before the Hebrews had appeared on the hill- 
top and they swarmed out like angry wasps in de- 
fense of their homes. The casualties of the battle 
seem ludicrously small — tradition said that thirty- 
six dead were left on the field — the rest saved their 
lives by running away. 

The reason for the defeat is plain enough. It 
came from too much confidence and too little prepar- 
ation. Those who told the story in Israel, however, 
saw another problem. Why did the God of the na- 
tion allow his people to be defeated? Their answer 
was, because God's command had been disobeyed. 

In the destruction of Jericho a Hebrew had found 
a rich Babylonian cloak, a sum of silver and a bar of 
gold. The value of the silver was about $140, of 
the gold about $500, but the purchasing value was 
much more. The wealth had tempted his greed and 
he had taken it and hid it in his tent. All the booty 



158 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

of the city had been " devoted M to Jehovah; that is, 
it was all to be destroyed as a sacrifice to God who 
had given them the victory and so this man had not 
merely been a thief, but, far worse, in the ancient 
world, a sacrilegious person. His crime was so great 
that it had stained the entire people. It was one 
which in antiquity was judged worthy of death. 
Achan and all his family were stoned to death in a 
valley near by, and his goods, his flocks and tents 
and the stolen property were burned. Over the 
ashes a pile of stones was raised as a lasting memorial 
of the crime and its punishment. 

Now they turned again to the military campaign. 
Ai must be captured. This time, however, they had 
no intention of underestimating their enemy. A 
larger army climbed the steep path. A stratagem 
common to nomadic people when besieging towns 
was arranged. At night a force was hidden on one 
side of the town. In the morning a force showed 
themselves on the other side, advancing as though to 
give battle. The warriors went out again from Ai, 
and again the Hebrews turned and fled with their 
enemies pursuing and the city gates left open and un- 
defended. Then the Hebrews in ambush came out 
and won an easy victory. The town was " devoted," 
like Jericho, and after its complete destruction the 
army marched back to the Hebrew camp at Gilgal. 

The people in the hill country of Palestine were 
divided into independent city-states. There were 
anxious hours among them when it was learned that 
the Hebrews had opened the way from the Jordan 
Valley to the hilltops. If they had combined they 



THE WAR OF CONQUEST 159 

could easily have defended the steep roads from the 
valley, but combination is a very hard thing for some 
people to learn. The country had formerly been 
part of the Egyptian empire. Perhaps the Egyp- 
tians still claimed it, but if so they did not defend it. 

The Canaanites relied wholly on themselves; and 
not without success. The Hebrews never conquered 
some of the towns. The old inhabitants lived for 
centuries among the invaders till at last the people 
all melted into one. One of the groups of Canaan- 
ites were the Gibeonites, who lived in the city of 
Gibeon and in neighboring villages, five or six miles 
northwest of Jerusalem and six or seven southwest 
of Ai. The Hebrews had an ancient treaty with 
these people, which even in the days of King David 
was still regarded as binding. 

This is the story which was told of the origin of 
the treaty: After the capture of Ai the fear of 
the Hebrews was great among the people of the land, 
for they knew that their country now lay open to 
attack. The Gibeonites planned a cunning scheme 
to save themselves. They fitted out an expedition to 
look as though it had come a long journey. The 
saddlecloths of their asses were worn, their leathern 
waterbottles old and torn, their sandals patched, their 
clothes ragged, their bread dry and mouldy. When 
they came into the Hebrew camp at Gilgal the crowds 
gathered and stared at the seemingly weary and way- 
worn travelers. u Where do you come from?" 
asked Joshua, " and who are you ? " " We are from 
a very far country," they said, but they did not give 
its name. " Our people have heard of your great 



i6o THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

power and have sent us as ambassadors. This bread 
we took fresh from the oven when we started; see 
how dry it is now. These ragged sandals and 
clothes were new when we started. It has been a 
long, long journey. Now make a treaty with us." 
The Hebrews were puffed up with pride. They 
made the treaty; then the embassy left for their re- 
turn journey, doubtless taking a good stock of fresh 
bread to last on the long and weary march. 

Soon the Hebrews learned that these ambassadors 
lived just over the tops of the western mountains, but 
though they protested against the deceit by which 
the treaty was gained, they still honored it. 

The memory of a great battle was linked with 
this story of the Gibeonite treaty. The report 
spread among the hills that Gibeon had formed an 
alliance with the Hebrew invaders. That seemed 
treason to the interests of the other hill towns and 
they planned to punish the traitors. The head of 
the plot was the king of Jerusalem. He combined 
with the kings of Hebron, twenty miles to the south; 
Jarmuth, sixteen miles west, Lachish and Eglon, 
twenty miles w r est of Hebron on the border of the 
plain. They gathered the forces of these towns and 
of the villages about and moved to besiege Gibeon. 
The Gibeonites sent to the Hebrews for help and the 
Hebrews responded. The besiegers were surprised 
and fled, followed by the Hebrews. They went up 
a sharp, rocky ascent to a village, Upper Beth-horon, 
then to Beth-horon, deep in the valley. This is a 
famous road. Caravans and armies have marched 
up and down it from the wanderers of the earliest 



THE WAR OF CONQUEST 161 

days of history to the Allies in the recent war. The 
Hebrews, weary but victorious, cared little for the 
history of their road. The day seemed scarcely long 
enough for their purpose. An old song, current 
later in Israel, told how Joshua delayed the very sun 
from setting that they might have time to defeat 
their foes. Joshua said, 

" Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, 

Thou, Mocn, in the valley of Ajalon, 

So the sun stood still 

And the moon was stayed 

Till the people defeated their foes." 

It is a poetic way of saying that nature itself 
fought with Israel, as another ancient poem says of 
another occasion that " the stars in their courses 
fought against Sisera." 

After southern Palestine had been subdued an- 
other combination was made by the kings of north- 
ern Palestine, in the country known in the New Test- 
ament as Galilee. Here a great battle was said to 
have been fought at the Waters of Merom, some- 
times identified with the Lake of Huleh, north of the 
Sea of Galilee. The first chapter of Judges contains 
a section of an old account which shows that long 
after the times of Joshua the towns of both central 
and northern Palestine were still held by the Canaan- 
ites, even though the Hebrews had pasture and camp- 
ing rights on the hills. 

Joshua 7, 8: 1-29, Failure and success at Ai. Joshua 9, 
The Gibeonite league. Joshua 10, Conquest in southern 
Palestine. Joshua 1 1, Conquest in northern Palestine. 
Judges 1, Towns still unconquered. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE LAST DAYS OF JOSHUA 
How the Great Warrior Became a Great Preacher 

Much of the Book of Joshua after the twelfth 
chapter is occupied with an account of the division of 
Palestine between the tribes. It is valuable as a 
record of tribal boundaries long after the days of 
Joshua, but its assumption that Joshua himself made 
the division belongs rather to tradition than to his- 
tory. The earliest stories of the conquest make no 
such claim. The fragments preserved in the first 
chapter of Judges are from these early stories and 
tell how each tribe fought its own battles and won its 
own territory. 

But in later ages all this was forgotten. All the 
land had belonged to Israel for many generations, 
and even the old stories of the way some of the 
tribes had won their towns for themselves did not 
hinder other story-tellers from assigning all the con- 
quest and the distribution of all the country to the 
great hero of Ephraim, Joshua. Now Joshua was 
certainly a very great character and worthy of all 
the praise that was given him. If later people 
ascribed to him more than properly belonged to him, 
it was only what people are always doing with their 
great heroes. 

162 



H Hebrews 
11111 Canaanites 
\:j. . ., 1 Philistines 




ISH MA ELITES 



r\a b i an 
e s e r t 

ViTCTa'ms INGMVW8 CO.,N.Y. 



TERRITORIAL DIVISION OF CANAAN AFTER THE 
FINA& SETTLEMENT OF THE HEBREW TRIBES 

163 



1 64 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

The tribes as finally settled may be divided into 
four groups : 

I. The southern tribes. ( I ) Judah, a large tribe, 
holding the southern hills from the Dead Sea to the 
Philistine plain and from the southern half-desert to 
the city of Jerusalem. In the early days the tribe 
was not so important as later. (2) Benjamin, a 
small tribe whose territory reached from Jerusalem 
to just north of Bethel. (3) Dan, on the slopes of 
the hills west of Benjamin and Ephraim, extending 
from near Beth-horon to the sea at Joppa. The 
Philistines later crowded them out of their territory 
and part of them migrated to the extreme north of 
Israel, where they captured a town and called it Dan. 
(4) Simeon, whose land lay in the southern part of 
Judah. The tribe was always weak and in Joshua 
19: 1-9 is reckoned as a part of Judah. 

II. The central tribes. (5) Ephraim, lying on 
the hills north of Benjamin. It did not hold a large 
territory but its central position and the energy of 
its people made the tribe one of the most important 
in Israel. (6) Manasseh lay next to the north. It 
had the largest territory of any in this group, reach- 
ing from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, but part 
of its land was still held in the earlv times by the 
Canaanites. It contained Mounts Ebal and Ger- 
azim and the town of Shechem near by, famous 
places in early Israel. (7) Issachar lay to the 
north, holding the hills near the Jordan Valley and 
a part of the Plain of Esdraelon. This tribe was 
also restricted by the Canaanites, who remained 
strong in the plain. 



THE LAST DAYS OF JOSHUA 165 

III. The northern tribes occupied the hills north 
of the plain of Esdraelon. (8) Zebulun occupied 
the western part of the country immediately north 
of Esdraelon, extending along the coast from Mount 
Carmel almost to Accho. In its territory lay Naz- 
areth, which is never mentioned in the Old Testa- 
ment. (9) Asher lay north of Zebulun, and 
reached to the borders of Phoenicia. An outlying 
member of the Hebrew group, it was never very im- 
portant in the national history. (10) Naphtali oc- 
cupied a long strip north of Issachar along the Jordan 
and the Sea of Galilee. Farther north it expanded 
to include more than half the territory west of the 
upper Jordan. 

IV. The tribes east of the Jordan. (11) Rueben 
held the northern part of the plain of Moab, from 
the Arnon to a line a little north of the Dead Sea. 
(12) Gad occupied the broken hill country east of 
almost the entire course of the Jordan from the Sea 
of Galilee to the Dead Sea. (6a) The tribes east 
of the Jordan were reckoned as " Reuben, Gad and 
the half tribe of Manasseh," for north of the terri- 
tory of Gad lay a wide country of pasture lands over 
which roamed shepherd clans of Manasseh who had 
preferred the great plains to the hills of Palestine. 

This lists twelve tribes, and yet leaves out the 
important tribe of Levi. This tribe had no terri- 
tory, perhaps because too weak in the days of con- 
quest to win a foot-hold by war. Later they became 
the priestly tribe. When they are reckoned in, the 
tribes are made twelve by uniting Ephraim and 
Manasseh under the name of their father, Joseph. 



1 66 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

As often happens with the memory of a warrior, 
the tales about Joshua deal almost entirely with his 
conquest. There was a tradition that Joshua gath- 
ered the people to the narrow valley between two 
sharp peaks, Ebal and Gerazim, and there read to 
them the covenant of Moses. On one mountain 
stood a man who read the blessings, on the other, one 
who read the curses, and to each the concourse of 
people below responded " Amen." Tradition as- 
signed the arrangement of this dramatic scene to 
Moses and Joshua only carried out the plan. 

For the most part, no traditions break the silence 
of the years of Joshua's life after the first vigorous 
battle for the possession of the land. 

In the east a man who had been a leader in battle 
never lost his influence. The Hebrews, like the 
tribes of the desert from which they came, had no 
king. There was no ruler. When war arose the 
man who could lead was given command. When the 
war was over and the people scattered, taking their 
flocks where pasturage was found, they saw no need 
for rulers. Every man ruled his own tent, and 
what more was needed? If quarrels arose the old 
men of the neighborhood settled them. Joshua was 
the greatest man in Israel, but his position was 
rather one of influence than of authority. His home 
was in the northern part of the land of Ephraim, just 
off the road which led from the north to the south, 
about nine miles from Shechem. We can picture 
the last years of Joshua as a life of quiet, like a long 
summer evening following a stormy day. 

Two striking addresses were ascribed to Joshua in 



THE LAST DAYS OF JOSHUA 167 

his old age. When Joshua was old, so the tales 
went, he sent out word through the country for all 
the leaders, the influential old men, the heads of the 
tribes and the families to come to him. They came, 
and the aged warrior spoke to them of the past and 
the future. 

11 I am old," he said, " but you need me no longer. 
You have seen how Jehovah fought for you. Not 
all the old inhabitants of the land are conquered, but 
God will still fight for you if you will cling to him 
and to him only. There will be temptations to turn 
aside to the ways of the peoples about you and to 
serve their gods. Do not yield. If you stand firm 
to the worship of your God one man shall chase a 
thousand. If you abandon him, then you will be 
lost among these people about you. You know that 
not one thing has failed of all that God promised you. 
If you abandon Him, not one evil thing will fail of 
all His threats. You will quickly perish out of the 
good land which God has given you." The central 
idea of the speech is that national prosperity de- 
pends on faithfulness to religious ideals. 

Once again the word went out through all Israel 
that Joshua had called the people together. The 
meeting place was Shechem, that ancient sacred place 
where the Hebrews had buried the bones of Joseph 
in the plot which legend said had been bought by 
Jacob. Here, near the grave of their ancestor, un- 
der the shadow of the twin mountains, Ebal and 
Gerezim, in the most impressive spot in all central 
Israel, the tale placed the last recorded events of 
Joshua's life. He reviewed before the people the 



i68 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

history of the past. It is significant that he speaks 
in the name of Jehovah. The aged warrior had be- 
come a prophet, and God speaks through him. 
11 Your fathers dwelt beyond the Euphrates and 
served other Gods. I called Abraham and brought 
him to the land of Palestine. I was with his de- 
scendants. I went with them to Egypt and brought 
them back again out of slavery into this land. I 
fought your enemies. I gave you the land 
in which you dwell, cities you built not, vine- 
yards and olive orchards you planted not. Now 
therefore " — Joshua speaks in his own person 
here — " serve Jehovah the giver of all your goods, 
not the gods your ancient fathers served. If you will 
not serve Jehovah, then choose this day whom you 
will serve; whether those gods of your fathers or 
these gods of the peoples of Palestine; but as for me 
and my house, we will serve Jehovah." The people 
said, " We too will serve Jehovah, since he has done 
so much for us and our nation. He is our God." 
11 You cannot serve Jehovah," broke out the old man. 
" He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. If you 
promise to serve him and then turn to other gods, 
he will do you evil and consume you, in spite of all 
the good he has done you before." " Nay, but we 
will serve Jehovah," persisted the people. " You 
have chosen him," said Joshua. " You are witnesses 
to it." " We are witnesses," they said. " Then 
see," he said, " that you put away all other gods and 
serve Jehovah only." " Jehovah our God we will 
serve," they reiterated. So Joshua made a covenant 
with them and bound them under a vow to worship 



THE LAST DAYS OF JOSHUA 169 

only Jehovah. There was a sacred tree in Shechem 
which tradition said was there when Jacob was in the 
land, and by it he had pledged his family to the 
worship of Jehovah. Under its shade Joshua set up 
a stone to be a perpetual memorial of the nation's 
devotion to Jehovah. 

Then follows the statement that at the age of a 
hundred and ten years Joshua died and was buried 
at his homestead in Timnath-Serah, and the story 
of Joshua is ended. 

He was a vigorous character, fearless in battle, 
clever in strategy, wise in council, whole-hearted in 
his service to God, utterly unselfish in his devotion to 
his people. He sincerely tried to carry out the 
ideals of Moses. He stands as the link between two 
periods. His work closed the wanderings of Israel 
and introduced the period of the Judges. 

Deuteronomy 27:1-19, Joshua 8:30-35, The nation 
pledged to Jehovah. Joshua 23, 24, The nation again 
pledged to Jehovah. The close of Joshua's life. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE MIGRATION OF DAN 

A Tale Out of the Days of the Conquest 

When Joshua died Israel had already lost what- 
ever unity it had formerly possessed. Judah and the 
southern tribes safely pastured their flocks on the 
hills, but north of them, stretching right across the 
country, lay a line of Canaanite fortresses which they 
could not conquer. The strongest of these was 
Jerusalem, but other towns west of that city still held 
out. Just north lay the Gibeonite guild, in treaty 
with Israel. These together so shut off Judah from 
the Hebrews of the north that in early times Judah 
was hardly reckoned as a part of Israel. The re- 
sults were very lasting. To the end of their history 
Northern and Southern Israel, even when under one 
government, were as distinct as Scotland and Eng- 
land and sometimes as antagonistic as Ireland and 
England. Farther north lay the great body of 
Israel, but they were broken by the plain of 
Esdraelon, held by the Canaanites, to whom also 
many fortified towns still belonged. The Hebrews 
had control of a few towns and rights of residence in 
a few others, but in the main they were only shep- 
herds in the open country. This situation could not 
be lasting. Some day it must be changed. 

170 



THE MIGRATION OF DAN 171 

In such a condition one of three things may hap- 
pen. ( 1 ) The two races may combine to make one 
nation. Thus the Saxons and Normans combined to 
make the English race. (2) The old inhabitants 
may push out the newcomers and win back all their 
land. (3) The newcomers may conquer the old in- 
habitants and either blot them out or keep them in 
the position of a lower race. What happened in 
Israel was a combination of (1) and (3). When 
later people told stories about the distant past they 
naturally emphasized the memories of conquest, but 
there are many evidences that the Hebrew race had 
a great mixture of Canaanitish blood. 

All this, however, took a long time. For the first 
century or two the future of the Hebrews was very 
doubtful. They w r ere so scattered and the other 
peoples so strong that they might easily have been 
crushed. There was still another danger. The 
Canaanites were more civilized than the Hebrews. 
They built towns; the Hebrews lived in tents. They 
had horses and chariots of war; the Hebrews fought 
with bows and arrows. They had merchants and 
caravans, and their store houses contained robes 
from Babylon and goods from Egypt. The 
Hebrews were rude shepherds from the desert. 
There was danger that they with their crude civiliza- 
tion would be absorbed by the more cultured Canaan- 
ites. That would have been a great loss to the 
world; for the Hebrews had one possession better 
than any held by the Canaanites; that was their idea 
of God. These rude shepherds carried the seed out 
of which a higher religion grew. 



172 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

During this time the different tribes were gaining 
a foot-hold in the land as they were able. Some- 
times they had to shift and change. Winning homes 
in the new land was a slow process, in spite of a few 
great victories under Joshua and other leaders. 
One story has come down which gives a very good 
idea of the struggles of some of the weaker tribes of 
Israel to find a place in Canaan. 

Far off on the hills in the north of Israel, under 
the lofty Hermon, one of the sources of the Jordan 
rises in a great spring under a cliff. The high, rocky 
ravine with its unusually large spring has been a 
sacred place from very early times. Here the tribe 
of Dan had their capital and sanctuary. It was the 
northern limit of the Hebrews. " From Dan to 
Beersheba," they said when they included all Israel. 
The story of its origin is preserved in an appendix to 
the Book of Judges, and it shows how curious and 
crude were the moral ideas of the time. 

Once upon a time there was a man in the hills of 
Ephraim named Micah. He stole some money 
from his mother, but when he heard the curses she 
laid upon the thief he was frightened and returned 
it. His mother took part of the money and made 
an image of wood, covered with silver. They set 
it up in a little family shrine, and consecrated one of 
Micah's sons to be the priest. Jehovah was wor- 
shiped at the shrine, for in these early days 
there was no serious objection in the minds of the 
Hebrews to images of Jehovah. A wandering 
Levite came along, a young man who had some train- 
ing as a priest, seeking work. Micah engaged him 



THE MIGRATION OF DAN 173 

to be the priest in place of his son. Now he expected 
Jehovah's blessing for he had an idol and a shrine 
and a trained priest, all for his own family. 

This was before the days of the kings, and there 
was no government over the tribes. Each had to 
fend for itself and fight its own battles. The tribe 
of Dan had a small territory down on the foothills 
west of Benjamin. The large tribe of Ephraim 
pressed on them from the north. In the hills to the 
south and east were towns still held by the Canaan- 
ites. On the plains to the west certain new settlers 
called Philistines had perhaps already begun to push 
out the other peoples. Though the Danites were 
only a small tribe, they felt that they had not yet 
won their real inheritance in Israel. 

They had hopes that off to the north, beyond the 
lands claimed by the Hebrews, there might still be 
places open to conquest by a good sword and a strong 
right arm. Five men set out to see what they could 
find. They toiled up over the mountains of Ephraim 
and before they had got far on their way passed the 
home of Micah with its family temple. They asked 
the young priest if he would inquire of God for 
them. He consulted the oracle and told them that 
God was with them and their journey would be pros- 
perous. Then the Danite delegation went on, in- 
debted perhaps for lodging and certainly for use of 
his priest and oracle to Micah. And very pious they 
felt, for had they not laid their plans before God and 
gained his approval? 

They pushed across the plain of Esdraelon and up 
among the hills of the northern tribes. All the land 



174 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

was occupied by forces too strong for them to cope 
with. Then they came to the northern boundary of 
Israel, where there were few towns and the great 
heights of the Lebanon Mountains made travel diffi- 
cult. Here they found a town called Laish. The in- 
habitants were Zidonians, but Zidon lay far off over 
the Lebanon Mountains, by the side of the sea, and 
this distant colony had almost lost touch with their 
home land; nor were they under the protection of 
any other clan. They thought the bare mountains 
about were protection enough. Who would want 
their little rocky valley, perched up under the steep 
sides of Hermon? So they lived, careless and 
secure. They were at peace with their nearest 
neighbors and never dreamed that tribes from a 
distance might covet their poor little heritage. 

The Danite scouts had seen what they wanted and 
went back. " What news? " their tribesmen asked. 
" We have found the place," the scouts answered. 
" It is large enough for us, and the land produces 
everything on earth, and the people are unsuspicious. 
Let us go without delay." 

So a part of the tribe of Dan took their flocks and 
their families and started for the north. Six hun- 
dred men — a large army for their little tribe — set 
out on this raid. On the second day they passed 
the house of Micah where the scouts had been enter- 
tained so hospitably. " Do you know," said these 
conscienceless scamps, " in these houses are images 
and oracles; now what do you want to do? " The 
hint was sufficient. The warriors engaged the young 
priest in conversation while the scouts stole the 



THE MIGRATION OF DAN 175 

images. " What are you doing? " said the priest as 
they came out with the booty. " Keep still and 
come along with us," they replied. " It is better 
to be a priest of a tribe than of a family. " The 
priest had no more conscience than the rest and 
gladly went off with the thieves. Doubtless that 
night he stood before the stolen image and asked 
God to be good to his new employers. 

Before long Micah and his neighbors came dashing 
up from the rear. The warriors faced about and 
said, " What is the matter? Why all this com- 
pany? n " You have stolen my gods and my priest, 
and now you say * What is the matter? ' " retorted 
Micah. " You had better keep quiet," said the men 
of Dan. " Somebody might become angry and kill 
you." Micah and his neighbors, seeing they were 
outnumbered, went back home; and the Danites, with 
a god and a priest, went on to new adventures. 

At last they came within striking distance of Laish, 
lying in its retired valley quiet and secure. They 
attacked the place, burnt the town, murdered the 
people, and took possession of the gardens and pas- 
ture lands. They built a new town, which they called 
Dan, and there they set up a shrine with the stolen 
image; and, the story had it, the run-away priest was 
a grandson of Moses himself. 

There was a time much later, under the kings of 
northern Israel, when this shrine and that at Bethel 
were made the two great shrines of northern Israel, 
to rival Jerusalem in southern Israel. If this story 
of its origin was a sample of the teaching given there 



176 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

no very lofty ideas of God or of morals could have 
come from it. 

What a picture the story gives of society and re- 
ligion in early Israel! What ideas of honesty and 
gratitude ! What conceptions of worship and priest- 
hood! They thought that u might makes right," 
and that what was won by the sword was the gift of 
God. They were a barbaric people with a barbaric 
religion, but they had the germs of higher things. It 
was the childhood of religion. For a nation at 
present to sink back to their belief that " might makes 
right " marks a degradation, for the world has now 
passed beyond childhood in religion and morality. 

Judges 17, Micah and his shrine. Judges 18, The migra- 
tion of Dan. 



CHAPTER XXV 

EHUD AND DEBORAH 
The Heroes of a Half-Formed Nation 

The period after Joshua was a time of chaos and 
confusion. It lasted till the people saw the need of 
a stable government and formed a kingdom. How 
long that was no one can say. It was more than a 
century and less than three centuries. 

The local leaders who rose during this period, now 
in one part of the country and now in another, are 
known as Judges. They gained their leadership in 
war, and when peace came through their efforts they 
naturally were headmen in their localities — sheiks, 
would be the Arabic term. They were primarily 
warriors rather than judges. They were not lead- 
ers of all Israel, for the tribes were as yet too scat- 
tered to work in harmony, but sometimes in a great 
national danger they were able to bring together sev- 
eral tribes. 

The tales of these warriors are in the Book of 
Judges. The first chapter of that book is a preface, 
explaining how early Israel was weak because so 
many of the towns were still held by Canaanites. 
Chapter 2 : 6 to 3 : 6 is an introduction, telling why 
the editor of the book put it together and what he 
wished to teach. To him, the history of the Judges 

177 



i 7 8 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

showed that prosperity comes to a nation only by 
serving God. Whenever Israel left Jehovah trouble 
came; when they turned back to him he gave them a 
leader and delivered them from their enemies. The 
stories of the Judges the writer drew from the old 
popular tales. He did not change the old stories but 
he introduced each with a little preface; " Again 
Israel turned away from Jehovah and again he gave 
them into the hands of their enemies." Later, two 
old stories about these times were added at the end 
of the book, chapters 17 and 18, 19 to 21. The first 
is the story of Dan, which we have already taken up. 

The Judges arose when the nation was attacked. 
The first attack the book mentions is from the 
Edomites in the extreme south. Othniel, a leader 
in the clan of the Calebites, is said to have delivered 
Israel. The whole story is very vague. Evidently 
the author knew no details. 

The next account is a story which must have been 
told among the tribe of Benjamin. The Hebrews 
were not the only people who wanted to come into 
Canaan. The Moabites from across the Dead Sea 
had also pushed down, taken the fords of the Jordan, 
gained control of the plain north of the Dead Sea, 
and made their center on the rich plains about the 
ruins of Jericho. From there they sent raiding 
parties up the roads into the hills and demanded 
tribute of the scattered Hebrew villages. The poor 
shepherds would rather pay heavy tribute than 
have their sheep driven off by the fierce desert men. 
So they bought their peace, and every year sent their 



EHUD AND DEBORAH 179 

" present M down to King Eglon in the Jordan Valley. 

One year a man named Ehud, a Benjaminite, 
brought down the " present. M He put the tribute in 
the hands of the king, then with his party started 
back for the hills. When they came close to Gilgal, 
the old Hebrew camping ground, he turned back 
alone and returned to the court. " Tell the king I 
have a secret message for him," was the word he 
sent in. " I will receive him alone/' said the king, 
and he entered. Now the guards would never have 
allowed this had they supposed he was armed. A 
man with a sword wore it on his left side, where he 
could reach it quickly with his right hand, and Ehud 
had no sword there. But the fact was that Ehud 
was lefthanded, and, concealed under his robe on 
his right side where no one suspected it, was a sword 
made for this very occasion. " My message is from 
God," he said to the king as he entered. The king 
arose and quick as a flash the unexpected left handed 
blow came and the king fell dead. Their conference 
was in the little chamber on the roof where the sum- 
mer heat was tempered by a breeze. Ehud came 
out, locked the door, and was away before any one 
knew what had happened. So the Moabite danger 
was ended by one brave man who dared to do a cour- 
ageous deed on the chance of saving his people. 

There was grave danger of a far worse subjection 
than that to the Moabites. Among the tribes in 
the north there was an old ballad, perhaps the oldest 
of all the Hebrew poems which have come down to 
us, which told of the danger and the heroic way in 



i So THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

which it was met. The author of Judges thought so 
well of the old ballad that he has given it to us, and 
also given a prose story of the event. 

The danger arose from the Canaanites. They 
were by no means conquered yet, as we have seen. 
Even in the hill country they held most of the towns, 
and in the plain of Esdraelon, right across from 
Bethshan near the Jordan to Dor on the seashore, 
they held the whole country and allowed no Hebrew 
flocks to pasture on the rich valley lands. 

For a long time no Hebrew dared raise a hand 
against the Canaanites. It looked as though the 
Hebrews might sink to a group of clans of wandering 
shepherds, paying tribute to the townsmen and be- 
coming in time serfs again as they had been in Egypt. 

To be sure, there were Hebrew chiefs. There 
was one Barak, in the hills of Naphtali, but he 
doubted if he could gather enough of an army to 
make head against the Canaanite chief Sisera; and 
if he lost, that meant slaughter or slavery for all 
Hebrews in north Palestine. And so he and all the 
other chiefs of the Hebrews did nothing, while the 
situation grew continually worse. 

It took a woman to dare. On the hills of 
Ephraim lived a prophetess, a woman to whom it 
was believed God revealed his will. She summoned 
Barak and said that Jehovah had told him to gather 
the people and fight Sisera. Now Barak was the 
strongest leader in Israel, but so cowed were the 
people that even he doubted if he could rouse them. 
He wanted the moral support of Deborah with her 
reputation as a woman of God. " I will go if you 



EHUD AND DEBORAH 181 

will go with me," he said, u not otherwise. " She 
regarded the proposition as an evidence of weak- 
ness. " I will go," she said, " but the honors of this 
campaign will be for a woman, not for you." 

The place of gathering was Mount Tabor. It is 
a height northeast of the plain of Esdraelon from 
whose slopes could be seen the great stretch of valley 
with the river Kishon flowing through it, and on the 
other side, guarding the passes to the south, the 
Canaanite town of Taanach and, five miles farther, 
Megiddo. These towns were fortresses, with great 
stone walls and strong towers. 

Recently the towns have been excavated, and the 
Canaanite remains show a strong people who could 
easily hold at bay poorly armed shepherds like the 
Hebrews. A group of tablets from the correspond- 
ence of one of the Chiefs of Taanach was discovered 
dating somewhat before the Hebrews came to Pal- 
estine. One of the letters to him reads, " Send your 
brethren with their chariots, and a horse, your tribute 
and presents, and all your prisoners; send them to 
Megiddo to-morrow." It is plain that the Canaan- 
ites had been men of war long before the days of 
Deborah. 

No gathering of the Hebrew clans could take 
place under the very eyes of such experienced war- 
riors and not be known. Sisera, at his fortress 
Harosheth on the western side of the plain a mile 
north of the Kishon, was soon told of it. He took 
his own forces, gathered those of Taanach and 
Megiddo and the other Canaanite towns, and 
marched out on the level plain. Their plan was 



1 82 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

probably to surround the force on Tabor before the 
Hebrews could escape to the hills. On the plains 
they felt secure, for they had nine hundred chariots 
and the Hebrews had none. In the face of wheeled 
chariots, drawn by swift horses, footmen were as 
helpless as infantry with only rifles are to-day before 
heavy guns. 

The Hebrews from their camp on the slopes of 
Tabor saw the line of chariots deploying on the plain 
in the distance. Deborah said, " Now is the time, 
Jehovah goes before you," and down the mountain 
side and out on the plain rushed the Hebrew force. 
Then, as the song tells the story, a storm broke in 
the faces of the Canaanites and a deluge of rain 
swept over the plain. The flat land became a marsh 
of mud and the sluggish little Kishon, a raging tor- 
rent. The host was passing Megiddo when the 
storm broke and the frequent water-courses from the 
hills to the south were now running full. The horses 
floundered in the marshy ground, the chariots sunk 
in the mire. Some were swept away in the rapid 
Kishon. The level ground which had been their 
defense became their death-trap. The Hebrews 
with the storm at their backs had the enemy at their 
mercy. Surely Jehovah was with them. " The 
stars in their courses fought against Sisera." 

The battle became a rout. Every man fled where 
he could. Had the people of Meroz, an unknown 
town on the course of the fleeing host, only been alive 
to their chance, no one would have escaped. Sisera 
abandoning his chariot fled to the northern hills. 



EHUD AND DEBORAH 183 

Weary and wayworn he at last saw the tents of a 
group of Kenites from the south of Judah, who had 
wandered north with their flocks. These nomads 
had taken care to be at peace with all parties in the 
land. Here Sisera thought he might find refuge. 
At the door of the tent he asked for water. Jael, 
the mistress of the tent, poured him out a dish of 
curds, and as he lifted it to drink struck him down 
with a tentpin; so, as Deborah had said, the honors 
of the campaign went to a woman. 

The prose story of JaeFs deed is more elaborate. 
There the slaughter is treacherously made while 
Sisera is asleep. That is perhaps because the writer 
of the prose story understood the poem to speak of 
two weapons when, by repetition, it only means one 
weapon, the tentpin, which in the camp served for a 
weapon and a hammer and many other uses. 

The victory had two permanent results for the 
Hebrews; it showed the value of united action, and 
it increased their loyalty to Jehovah. As for the 
Canaanites, it finally broke their power. Though 
many years passed before the Hebrews won all their 
fortresses they never again subjected the Hebrews to 
their rule. 

While the battle was still fresh in mind some poet 
wrote a vigorous war ode. Perhaps it was sung in 
the village of Deborah when she returned after the 
campaign was over. It begins with praise to 
Jehovah, who came marching in the storm, and ends 
with the picture of Sisera's mother trying to keep 
up her courage as she waits his victorious return. 



1 84 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

There are obscurities in it, but it is vivid and pic- 
turesque and it stirred the hearts of many generations 
to faith in God and in their nation. 

Judges 2 : 6-3 : 6, The introduction, showing the purpose 
of Judges; compare 3 : 7-9, 4: 1-3, 6: 1-6. Judges 3 : 7-30, 
Ehud delivers Israel. Judges 4, Deborah and Barah de- 
liver Israel. Judges 5, The ballad of Deborah. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

GIDEON, REFORMER AND WARRIOR 

" Not by Might, nor by Power " 

How long was the time between Deborah and 
Gideon one cannot say. The statement in 5 : 3 1 that 
11 the land had rest forty years " is a part of the 
editor's work, and not of the original stories. The 
Canaanites and Hebrews now lived at peace. The 
Hebrews had become the dominant race. They 
were farmers, living in the towns and villages. They 
still had flocks pasturing on the mountains but they 
also owned land and raised grain. 

This change from a wandering to a settled life 
gave a chance for a higher civilization, but they be- 
came less warlike. 

The Arab tribes of the eastern desert found they 
could do what they pleased with the farmers of 
Palestine. We shall see that they probably had 
treaties with some of the people east of the Jordan, 
but they knew a more effective way with the people 
farther off, on the west of Jordan. Every year when 
the harvest was ripe a great horde of the nomads 
came across the Jordan, moved up into the rich 
region of the plain of Esdraelon and the fertile hills 
near by and proceeded to gather the harvest which 
the farmers had raised. It was the most cold-blooded 

185 



1 86 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

robbery imaginable. The farmers could do noth- 
ing, for the bandits came in swarms with their tents 
and swift camels. The story says that they spread 
over the land like a swarm of locusts. If any large 
proportion of the people could have united they 
might have made head against the robbers, but there 
was no sense of unity and no leader. The situation 
was peculiarly disheartening. The people labored 
on their farms all the summer only to see the harvest 
looted by this horde of brigands and carried off to 
feed the wives and children in robber camps while 
their own families went hungry. The condition was 
intolerable, but who was able to change it? 

The Midianites who were the leaders in the raids 
were mentioned in the earlier stories of Israel as liv- 
ing in the deserts of Sinai, to the south of Palestine. 
It was among them that Moses is said to have taken 
refuge when he fled to Egypt. Now they lived to 
the east of Palestine and in the course of time had 
lost their old friendship with the Hebrews. They 
were much such Arab tribes as still live in the same 
country and still would be glad to rob the settled 
farm lands if they dared. 

One autumn while the Arab robbers were camping 
in the land, a farmer named Gideon tried to save at 
least some of the wheat he had raised. He had 
reaped it and hidden it away. In other times he 
would have threshed it by spreading it out on the 
village threshing floor and driving oxen over the 
straw, but that was not safe now. Threshing floors 
were on high land to catch the wind for winnowing 
and could be seen from all the neighboring heights. 



GIDEON 187 

If the Arab raiders caught sight of him his grain 
would go into their tents. So he was beating out 
the wheat in the winepress, where the grapevines hid 
it from curious eyes. 

There was more to rouse Gideon than the national 
humiliation. His own brothers had been killed in 
some skirmish with the enemy, and upon him lay the 
obligation of revenge. But how could he revenge 
his brothers ? All Israel was helpless. He must sub- 
mit with the rest. As he pounded out the grain with 
a stick, the story said that a stranger looked down 
through the dust of the threshing floor and said, in 
common enough words of greeting, " God be with 
you." Quick as a flash, his mind full of the humilia- 
tion of the situation, he replied bitterly, " God with 
us! If that is so, why is all this happening? 
Where are the wonderful things our fathers told us 
of, when he brought them out of Egypt? No. 
God has forsaken us. He has given us to these 
Arabs." Then the stranger looked at him and said, 
" You will deliver Israel." " I," said Gideon. 
" How can I do it? My clan is the poorest in 
Manasseh, and I am the least in the clan." " Never- 
theless," said the stranger, " you will do it, and God 
will be with you." 

Evidently this stranger was a messenger from 
God, a prophet. Gideon wished to honor the 
stranger. He did what a modern Bedouin Arab 
would do if he had a distinguished guest, urged him 
to stay and eat with him. A meal was spread on a 
flat rock near by, when, as the story goes, the stranger 
touched it with his staff and fire broke out and con- 



1 88 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

sumed it. Then the farmer knew that his visitor was 
a divine being. 

Now the early Eastern people believed that gods 
might appear to men, but woe to the man to whom 
the appearance came, for " no man can look upon 
the face of God and live," so the first thought of 
Gideon was fear. But God answered, " Peace be to 
thee; fear not; thou shalt not die," and his mind was 
put at rest. 

If he was to lead the fight for Israel in the name 
of the national God then he must try to dispose of 
the worship of other gods. There was a shrine to 
the Baal, the god of the locality, near by, and that 
same night Gideon called his servants and broke it 
down. On its ruins he built an altar to Jehovah and 
sacrificed an offering. The people were angry at his 
defiance of Baal, but his father defended him. 

Now Gideon was ready for the next step. The 
great camps of the Arabs lay stretched across 
Esdraelon, near Jezreel, where the broad valley be- 
gins to slope down toward the Jordan. They felt 
secure in their numbers. As Gideon looked down 
from his native hills on the immense stretch of black 
tents he knew the danger of any attempt against 
them. Unless they could be suddenly and completely 
routed it would be better to do nothing. On their 
swift camels, hundreds of which were tethered about 
the widespread camp, they could carry a rapid cam- 
paign of frightfulness into all the country around. 
But he decided to take the risks. He called his own 
clan of Abiezer. Then, the later form of the story 
said, he called the warriors of Manasseh, Zebulun, 




Copyright by Underwood & Underwood. 

The Plain of Esdraelon, Overlooking the Battlefield of Gideon 

from the Village on the Site of Jezreel. The Mud Houses Are 

Tvpical of Palestine Villages and Grainrields Can Be Seen in the 

Plain. 



GIDEON 189 

Asher and Naphtali, the tribes about the plain of 
Esdraelon. They gathered on the slopes of the hills 
which lay south of the plain; thirty-two thousand of 
them, so the story said. 

One form of the tale brings in at this point a 
curious oracle. Gideon would test God's will yet 
further, and does it by means of a fleece of wool, 
which remained dry when all around was wet with 
dew, and became wet when all around was dry. 
Meantime the army was gathered — a miscellaneous, 
untrained mass. When Gideon gave permission for 
all who wished to go home there was a great scurry- 
ing away. Twenty-two thousand are said to have 
gone. Ten thousand were left, a formidable volun- 
teer force. But still Gideon was not satisfied. 
11 This," he said, " is God's battle, and it needs qual- 
ity not quantity." He moved his camp close to the 
enemy and in so doing crossed a brook which flows 
from a spring under Gilboa. As the thirsty men 
crossed, some drank in one way and some in another. 
Possibly there was some significance in the attitude 
they took to drink, but the chief thing was that the 
smaller number — only about three hundred — were 
chosen for the battle, and all the rest sent home. 

The gathering of the Hebrew clans was known to 
the Arabs, and Gideon was curious to learn what 
effect it had. In the early part of the night he went 
with a companion to reconnoiter. It was not much 
they heard — only a man telling his dream to his 
neighbor — but it showed how near to panic the 
camp had come. " I dreamed one of the round 
barley loaves came rolling into camp and hit a tent 



190 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

and overturned it." " The loaf means Gideon, the 
Hebrew," said his neighbor. u We are defeated. " 
Gideon had heard enough. Now was the time to 
strike. He hastened back to the camp and hastily 
arranged a clever stratagem. Three companies of 
Hebrews crept down on three sides of the Arab 
camp. Inside earthen drinking jars they held 
lighted torches, and they also had trumpets with 
them. Suddenly they broke the jars, flashed out 
the waving torches, and blew the trumpets and 
shouted, " For Jehovah and Gideon." The startled 
Arabs woke to a confusion of flashing lights and 
shouts and trumpet blasts; and the panic was on 
them. They thought every man seen in the dim 
starlight was an enemy, and slaughtered their own 
forces. Those who could mounted camels, and 
those who could not fled on foot. The fugitives 
poured down the valley toward the Jordan, still 
fighting among themselves, while the Hebrews fol- 
lowed after. In the Jordan Valley the Arabs veered 
toward the fords to the south. Gideon, who kept 
his wits in the confusion of battle, quickly dispatched 
messengers to the neighboring Ephraimite villages 
asking them to hold the fords and head off the fugi- 
tives. They did so, and killed two of the sheiks of 
the tribe, named Oreb and Zeeb. 

Meantime Gideon and his three hundred crossed 
by the upper fords following a portion of the scat- 
tered army. Day must have dawned by this time. 
The Hebrews, weary and hungry, appealed for food 
to two Hebrew towns, only to be refused. The 



GIDEON 191 

towns were in treaty with the Arabs and dared not 
give aid. 

The first stage of the campaign had been wholly 
successful. Now came the second stage. Merely 
to drive Midian across the Jordan was not enough. 
At some place far away on the border of the desert 
was the main camp of the tribe. The remnants of 
the fugitives felt safe when they reached it nor did 
any dream that the Hebrews would come so far from 
home. Gideon made a forced march, fell unexpect- 
edly on the camp, routed his foe a second time, and 
carried off the two chief sheiks of the tribe. His 
plan was to weaken them so thoroughly that they 
would not dare to cross the Jordan again. 

On his way back he took sharp vengeance on the 
towns which had refused help to their fellow coun- 
trymen. He conciliated Ephraim, a tribe often ar- 
rogant and always jealous of its honor; took blood 
revenge on the sheiks for the death of his brothers; 
and gave his part of the rich booty of the battle to 
make an image in honor of Jehovah who had given 
him the victory. The later writer of Judges, living 
in an age when the prophets objected to images, said 
that this became a snare to Gideon and his house. 

Is it any wonder that the people, tired of disunion, 
offered this brave warrior and wise leader the king- 
ship for himself and his successors? Not since the 
days of Joshua had there been such a leader in Israel. 
Doubtless he would have made a good king; but 
doubtless he saw that the people were not ready for 
a united rule. Gideon was wise in refusing to at- 



192 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

tempt the impossible and try to make a kingdom in 
Israel. 

Judges 6, Gideon's call. Judges 7, The first battle. 
Judges 8, The second battle. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

ABIMELECH AND JEPHTHAH 
Two Types of Men of Ambition 

A great chief of the ancient East often made 
many marriages. Sometimes they were means of 
binding himself to neighboring tribes in alliance, or 
of linking the different sections of his own people 
to his interests. At least one of Gideon's wives was 
a Canaanite, and her son, Abimelech, reckoned him- 
self more Canaanite than Hebrew. He lived near 
Shechem, among his mother's people; for this old 
city still belonged to the Canaanites. 

Shechem lies at the opening of the valley between 
Ebal and Gerazim. It was the meeting place of 
two important roads, one east and west and one 
north and south. From very ancient days there had 
been a town here. The inhabitants were proud of 
their town and of its long history. Without doubt 
they looked on the Hebrews as a wild, rude people 
who ought, if justice were done, to be under the con- 
trol of the old inhabitants of the land. It was one 
thing to acknowledge the power of that vigorous old 
warrier Gideon, and quite another to be under his 
sons after his death. 

Abimelech came to the authorities of Shechem and 
raised the race problem. He played on their fears 

193 



i 9 4 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

of Hebrew rule. " Is it better that all Gideon's 
seventy sons should rule," he said, " or one only? 
And if one, can there be any choice? Remember 
that I am your own blood." The hint was enough. 
Now was the time to get the rule into their own 
clan. 

In all the ancient world the shrines of the gods 
were places where the treasures of people were 
deposited. The Shechemites took money from the 
deposits in their local temple and gave to Abim- 
elech. He used it for the unholy hire of assassins. 
On some dark night the party sneaked off to Ophrah, 
among the hills to the south, and killed all the sons 
of Gideon on whom they could lay hands, slaugh- 
tering them on a sacrificial stone, possibly as a sac- 
rifice to the Canaanite god whose temple had fur- 
nished the pay of the murderers. And so the way 
was cleared by blood for the building of a kingdom. 
To be sure, the youngest of Gideon's sons, Jotham, 
had escaped from the massacre, but that was of no 
importance. 

Jotham's escape was of no importance as far as 
the history of the kingdom went. The Hebrews did 
not rally to him to avenge his brothers' murder. 
By all the rules of tribal honor they ought to have 
done so. It was a bitter disgrace to him that they 
did not. They were too disunited to join against 
the forces of Abimelech, and so they swallowed the 
insult to their race and kept still. 

Meantime Abimelech's plans went successfully. 
The Shechemites made him their king. A great 
feast was held at the shrine and Abimelech was 



ABIMELECH AND JEPHTHAH 195 

crowned. Suddenly over the crowd came a voice, 
14 Hear me, men of Shechem, if you would have God 
hear you." The crowd stood still and looked up 
the mountain whence the voice came. On a project- 
ing rock of the steep face of Gerazim stood a figure. 
Abimelech recognized him as Jotham, a most un- 
welcome guest at his coronation feast. If Jotham 
had concealed avenging Hebrews in the hollows of 
the hills the feast would end in a fight. But Jotham 
had no warriors — the more shame to his father's 
clan — and was only giving himself the personal 
satisfaction of making Abimelech ridiculous in the 
eyes of his guests. He told the listening crowd a 
little fable, such as orientals always loved. " Once 
upon a time the trees went out to choose a king. 
They said to the olive, l Be our king ' ; but the olive 
said, * Should I leave my richness which serves men 
and gods and come to rule over the trees? ' Then 
they said to the fig-tree, 4 Be our king.' The fig- 
tree said, 4 Should I leave my sweet figs and come 
to rule over the trees? ' Then they said to the vine, 
4 Be our king, 1 but the vine said, l Should I leave my 
vintage and come to rule over the trees?' Then 
they said to the bramblebush, 4 Be our king.' And 
the little bramblebush was very haughty and said, 
4 If you will really make me king, then come and trust 
in my shadow, and if not, let fire come out and burn 
all the great forest.' Now if you have dealt honor- 
ably with the house of Gideon, much joy may you 
and your bramble-king have of each other; and if 
not, may you and he wreck each other"; and with 
that curse on them he turned and disappeared among 



196 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

the rocks on the mountains. The festivities must 
have rung a little hollow after that. When the 
hired singers sung their songs of extravagant praise 
to the new-made king and promised him greatness 
and glory men must have whispered to each other, 
" Bramble-king." 

Things began to go badly in Shechem. Two 
forms of the story are combined in the account of 
Judges; very likely both are correct. One says that 
the men of Shechem became highway robbers and 
plundered the caravans. The other story has a long 
account of an adventurer, Gaal, who settled in 
Shechem and soon began to talk about how much 
better things would be if he were king; and the 
fickle, sordid Shechemites went over to him and 
made another coronation feast for this smooth- 
spoken scoundrel. Abimelech did not live in 
Shechem, but he had one faithful follower, Zebul, 
his chief in the city, who sent word of what was 
going on. Abimelech did not delay. That night he 
ranged troops on various sides of the city and in 
the morning, what with Zebul within and Abimelech 
without, Gaal and his party were forced into a los- 
ing fight; and that was the end of one ambitious 
adventurer. 

But it was not the end of the trouble at Shechem. 
Things had come to such a pass that Abimelech 
planned another ambush, and when the men of 
Shechem had gone out, perhaps on a robbing excur- 
sion, attacked them from behind, cut off their retreat 
to the city, as Joshua had done at Ai, and routed 
them and destroyed the city. Near by was a for- 



ABIMELECH AND JEPHTHAH 197 

tress, the Tower of Shechem. Its inhabitants left 
the fortress and fled to the local temple. Now in 
all the ancient world a temple was a place of refuge. 
But Abimelech refused to allow the fugitives the 
refuge of the temple. He led his band to a wooded 
hill near by, every man cut a bough from a tree, 
and they piled the wood in front of the heavy door 
of the temple and set fire to it. So he destroyed the 
people of Shechem who had made him king and the 
temple of the god before whose shrine he had been 
crowned. 

Thirteen miles from Shechem on the road to Beth- 
shean, where there is still a large village, was a town 
with a fortified tower. It had roused his anger, how 
we do not know, and he marched against it. The 
people fled to the tower. He proposed to burn this 
also, and incautiously came up to set it on fire. A 
woman dropped a stone of the common hand mill 
on his head from the top of the tower. When he 
knew he must die he begged to be killed by the sword 
of a warrior that he might be spared the disgrace of 
dying from a woman's blow. And so the bramble 
king perished and his kingdom perished with him. 

All the stories of the judges thus far have come 
from the central and northern parts of Israel, but 
the tribes east of the Jordan had their troubles also. 
At some time during this period the Ammonites, a 
shepherd people living to the east of Gilead, began 
to make raids on the Hebrews. They were not 
merely cattle-thieves; they had an old grudge against 
Israel. Long ago they had held a part of Gilead. 
Then a stronger tribe, the Amorites, had crowded 



198 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

them out. Soon after their retreat the Hebrews 
had taken the land from the Amorites. Naturally 
the Ammonites still remembered that those rich pas- 
tures had once belonged to their fathers, and when 
they became strong enough to loot the towns and 
drive off the cattle, they had an excuse for it. 

In time the attacks grew so serious that the people 
of Gilead began to look for a leader to oppose 
ther^. In the rugged wilderness to the northeast 
lived an outlaw named Jephthah, a sort of desert 
Robin Hood, with his following of bold bandits. 
He had been driven out of Gilead, but when they 
needed a leader, the Gileadites went to his strong- 
hold in the desert. " Come and assist us against 
the Ammonites," they said. " I will," he replied, 
" on one condition; that you will make me the head 
of all your chiefs." It may have been a hard con- 
dition, but they consented. 

Jephthah prepared to meet the Ammonites and, 
since he was religious in his way, he sought to get 
the help of God by means of a vow. He promised 
to sacrifice whoever first came out to meet him, if 
God would bring him home in victory. Jephthah 
meant to pledge a human sacrifice; that was his idea 
of the best gift he could offer God. He won his 
victory and when he came back the women of his 
camp arranged to meet the victor with music and 
dance; and his only child, his beloved daughter, led 
the dance with pride and joy. The stern old man 
was broken hearted, but he had no thought of tak- 
ing back his word. " Oh, my daughter," he cried, 
" you have crushed me. You! But I have prom- 



ABIMELECTI AND JEPHTHAH 199 

ised Jehovah. I cannot go back." His daughter 
knew what he meant. Human sacrifice was not un- 
common among the Palestinian people. Then this 
girl reared in the desert robber's tent rose to such 
nobility as no lady of a king's court ever surpassed. 
1 You have promised Jehovah," she said. " Do to 
me what you promised." 

She died without children to keep her name in 
memory; that seemed to ancient Hebrews the hard- 
est part of her hard fate. But the people never for- 
got her. Much later it was still a custom among the 
women of Gilead to hold each year a period of 
mourning for Jephthah's daughter. 

Jephthah lived to hold his headship in Gilead for 
only six years after this. His troubles were not 
with Ammon, but with Israel. Ephraim, always ar- 
rogant and jealous, objected to Jephthah's indepen- 
dence, as they had to Gideon's. Gideon had con- 
ciliated and flattered them. Jephthah fought them. 
After their defeat the Gileadites held the fords of 
t^e Jordan and made all suspicious characters say 
11 Shibboleth." The Enhraimites, who spoke a little 
different dialect, said " Sibboleth," and no Ephraim- 
ite was allowed to escane. What national life could 
be expected from so disunited a people? 

Tud^es 0, The man who wanted to he a king. Judges II, 
The victory of Jephthah and its pad ending. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

SAMSON 

The Least Heroic of Biblical Heroes 

During the time of the Judges another invasion of 
Palestine was going on. The Philistines appeared 
on the coast of the plain. They were wild sea- 
rovers like the Northmen in Europe, who made land- 
ings and settlements where they could. They prob- 
ably belonged to a group of peoples that were harry- 
ing the coasts of Egypt at this time. The Egyptians 
called them simply the Sea Peoples. Where they 
came from has been much discussed, perhaps from 
Crete or some of the islands or coasts of the Medi- 
terranean. They were vigorous warriors with com- 
pact, well organized governments. They speedily 
subdued all the plain by the sea, but usually let the 
hills alone. If, however, the people in the hills 
seemed to be growing too strong, so that their pos- 
session of the plain might be endangered, then the 
Philistines sent armies through the foothills and de- 
manded tribute. 

From these circumstances come the stories of 
Samson. He was a Danite, from the section of the 
tribe that had remained in their southern home. 
His birthplace was Zorah in a valley of the western 
foothills, about seventeen miles west of Jerusalem, 

200 



SAMSON 201 

only three or four miles from the border of the land 
of the Philistines. The two peoples lived in peace 
and even sometimes intermarried, but beneath their 
harmony there was a strong race feeling. Any 
story in which Hebrews got the better of the Philis- 
tines was repeated with great satisfaction, and we 
may be sure it lost nothing in the telling. 

To the modern way of thinking, Samson was very 
far from being a hero. He did nothing for his coun- 
try. He never led his people in battle. He never 
tried to better their condition in any way. Most of 
the judges were champions of Jehovah; he did noth- 
ing to further the worship of the national god. His 
morals were low, even from the standpoint of that 
crude civilization. The ideals of his life were selfish. 
The stories of him show a character not so much im- 
moral as unmoral, like the fawns and satyrs of Greek 
myth. He is pictured as an overgrown child, way- 
ward, blundering, vengeful, whose only claim for 
attention was his tremendous strength and the pitiful 
tragedy of the close of his life. 

Immense bodily strength was the center of all the 
stories told about him. These tales had elements 
of humor. In the country on the border of the Phil- 
istines, among a people whose fathers had fought 
those warriors and sometimes been conquered by 
them, stories of how Samson tricked them and did 
them damage were greatly enjoyed. 

The stories the people told accounted for Sam- 
son's strength by saying that he had been from birth 
under a vow that his hair should not be cut and that 
he should drink no wine. This vow, called the Naz- 



202 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

irite's vow, was often taken temporarily. It 
marked a devotion to the national God. The ab- 
stinence from wine marked the devotion to the god 
of the desert tribe by denying oneself the luxuries 
of the rich vineyards of Palestine. The hair was 
sacred in many religions. The devotee sometimes 
vowed it to his god and only cut it as a sacrifice 
to him. The popular explanation of Samson's 
strength was that Jehovah gave it to him in return 
for his strict keeping of the Nazirite vow. 

Samson's birth was predicted, so the story said, 
by a messenger from God, and the Nazirite life of 
the boy prescribed. When Samson was grown he 
saw, in the neighboring town of Timnah, a Philis- 
tine maiden who charmed his fancy and he asked 
his parents to get her for his wife. This did not 
please them. They had no liking for a foreign 
daughter-in-law. So the headstrong youth took 
matters into his own hands, and quite naturally got 
into trouble because of it. There were two kinds of 
marriages. In the more common kind the wife was 
brought to the home of the husband and the children 
became members of his clan. In the other the wife 
stayed with her own family and her children be- 
longed to her clan. Now as Samson's parents would 
not consent to a marriage of the first kind he pro- 
posed to make a marriage of the second kind. On 
his way to arrange the marriage he killed a lion 
among the vineyards but said nothing to any one 
about it. Later he went down to the marriage 
feast and turned aside to see what had become of 
the body of the lion. He found that a swarm of 



SAMSON 203 

wild bees had made a hive of its sun-dried skin and 
bones, and he took some honey and ate it as he 
walked on. Then came the seven days 7 wedding 
feast, with the festivities and games. As part of 
the entertainment the groom propounded a riddle to 
thirty young Philistine men who were his guests. 
If they could guess it during the feast he would give 
them thirty linen garments and festival robes; if not, 
they were to give him the same. 
The riddle was : 

From the eater came food to eat, 
From the strong came what is sweet. 

No wonder they despaired of guessing it and ap- 
pealed to the bride for help. 

Then just before the sun set on the last day of 
the feast the young men said to Samson, " What is 
sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a 
lion? " and Samson knew that his bride had betrayed 
him. Hot with indignation he deserted her before 
the wedding was hardly complete, paid his debt with 
the spoil of a raid on other Philistines, and went 
home. The father of the bride resented the dis- 
grace put upon his family and married the bride to 
Samson's best man, and considered his dealings with 
this hot-headed young Hebrew at an end. 

When Samson had time to cool his anger he re- 
gretted his action. He went to his wife as though 
no break had taken place, and was told by her father 
that she was married to another. Samsom said to 
himself, " Now I have a right to take vengeance." 
He caught foxes — three hundred of them, the He- 






2o 4 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

brew storytellers said, — tied burning brands between 
the tails of every two and turned them loose in the 
grain, already dry for the harvest. The fire spread 
far and wide through the fields. Hunger stared the 
people in the face, and since Samson was beyond their 
reach, they took savage vengeance on the family of 
the bride. 

Not satisfied with that, they resolved to capture 
Samson, who had taken refuge in a cave in the moun- 
tains of Judah. Now Judah was subject to their 
Philistine neighbors, and when an armed band of 
Philistines marched in and demanded Samson, the 
men of Judah bound him with ropes and gave him up. 
A great shout of glee arose as their prey was brought 
into the camp. That was a spur to Samson's strength. 
He broke the ropes, caught up the first weapon he 
could put hand on, the jawbone of an ass, and laid 
about lustily. The story said he killed a thousand 
men. Perhaps the number came from the punning 
couplet ascribed to him as he threw his weapon down, 

With the jawbone of an ass, mass upon mass, 

With the jawbone of an ass I killed a thousand enemies. 

Other stories were told in which his strength and 
nimble wits got the better of the Philistines. Once 
when they thought they had him trapped in Gaza, 
a city in the southern part of the plain, he slipped 
out in the night, pulled up the framework in which 
the city gates were set, and carried off gates, posts 
and all on his shoulders. He took them almost forty 
miles and set them down on a hill near Hebron. 



SAMSON 205 

No feats of strength were too great for popular tra- 
ditions to assign to this hero. 

At last he met his fate, and again it was his trust 
in a faithless Philistine woman which led him into 
trouble. He formed an attachment for a woman 
named Delilah who lived in Sorek not far from his 
home. Soon she began to beg him to tell her the 
secret of his strength. She probably thought it lay 
in some amulet or charm or talisman. Samson was 
minded to have his joke with her, and said, " I will 
tell you, If they bind me with seven fresh bow- 
strings I cannot break them." So she produced the 
seven bowstrings and bound him. Then she said, 
u The Philistines are coming," and he snapped the 
bowstrings and she saw that he had deceived her. 

Again she begged his secret, and again he pre- 
tended to tell her. " If they bind me with new ropes 
that never have been used I cannot break them," he 
said. So she brought new ropes and bound him, 
but when she said, " The Philistines are coming," 
he broke them off his arms like thread, and Delilah 
knew that she was deceived again. 

A third time she begged his secret, and a third time 
he pretended to tell her. " Weave my long hair into 
the web of the loom and beat it up tight in the cloth," 
he said, " and I cannot get away." She did so, 
but when she said, " The Philistines are coming," 
he walked off and took the loom with him. 

" How can you say you love me," said Delilah, 
" when you deceive me like this? " At last he told 
her the truth. His strength was the gift of God, 



206 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

and depended on his keeping the vow his parents 
had placed upon him. If his hair were cut his vow 
would be broken and his strength gone. 

Now with all her pretended love for Samson De- 
lilah was working for the Philistines. They had 
offered to make her rich for life if she would get 
the secret of Samson's strength. In his sleep she cut 
off his hair, and then when she said, " The Philis- 
tines are coming," he had no more strength than any 
other man. 

The broken giant was blinded and imprisoned, and 
set to turn a handmill. His tribe of Dan were too 
weak and too unwarlike to attempt his rescue or 
to take vengeance for him. Meantime, as his hair 
grew, his strength returned, but the Philistines never 
thought of that. 

One day there came a great festival, a sacrifice 
to Dagon, the god of the Philistines. As the feast 
went on they called for Samson. He was brought 
out and set to try feats of strength. Wearied at 
last, he asked to be allowed to rest against the pillars 
which upheld a crowded roof on one side of the open 
court of the high place of Dagon. Then, with a 
prayer for vengeance — the only religious suggestion 
in all the stories of his exploits — he threw himself 
with all his strength upon the pillars and brought the 
roof filled with people crashing down upon himself 
and the crowds beneath; and the merry festival ended 
in tragedy. 

Judges 13, The birth of Samson. Judges 14, 15, Sam- 
son^ exploits. Judges 16:4-31, Samson's defeat and death. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

STORIES OF THE BEGINNING 

What the Hebrews Believed about the Origins of 
Human History 

Every people has asked such questions as " How 
was the world made?" " Who was the first 
man? n " Why do different nations speak different 
languages? " The Hebrews also had their stories 
about the beginnings of things. In the main these 
came from the old stock of Semitic tales told long 
before the Hebrews became a separate race. Those 
who wrote the earliest collection made few changes 
in the traditions. They told them very much as the 
Hebrew children had heard them from the old men 
and women. 

Because those who first collected these tales were 
interested in religion they told the stories so as to 
teach the power and pity of God and the sad results 
of sin. These were the prophetic collectors of 
stories, who wanted to teach that God punished sin 
and rewarded the faithful. Later the priestly col- 
lectors also retold some of the old stories to show 
how certain things connected with worship or with 
the law arose. Both collections were used by the 
writer of Genesis, the first eleven chapters of which 
contain these traditions of the beginning of the 

world. 

207 



2o8 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

The first section of Genesis is a stately poem of 
creation. It came from the priestly collector of 
stories. He took a majestic old poem which divided 
the period of creation into six days. Each day had 
its work, ending with the creation of man. Then, 
God rested on the seventh day, and he blessed it and 
hallowed it and made it a day of rest for man. The 
priestly writer has told the story of creation to show 
how the Sabbath is embedded in the world itself. 
But more important for all time than this teaching 
regarding the Sabbath is the idea of God. He is a 
great God, who speaks and it is done, who creates 
and sees that it is good; and man, made in the image 
of God, shares his rule of the world and helps work 
out his purpose. It is a lofty idea of God and of 
man. 

In Genesis 2 : 4 begins the account from the pro- 
phetic collection of stories. It tells less of creation 
than of what took place afterwards. " In the day 
that Jehovah God made earth and heaven, then no 
plant of the field was yet in the earth " ; but a mist 
arose to water the dry ground and then plants grew. 
God made a garden and created a man, Adam, to 
care for it. He created animals in an attempt to 
make fit companions for the man, and when this did 
not succeed he created woman. As in so many old 
stories, the animals could talk with men and a snake 
persuaded the woman, and she the man, to disobey 
God. When God came down that evening to walk 
in the garden in the cool of the day they hid for 
fear of him. Adam and Eve were sent out of the 
garden, the snake was condemned to crawl Qn the 



STORIES OF THE BEGINNING 209 

ground and to be hated by men, and man was con- 
demned to labor and woman to suffer, while the 
earth was doomed to hinder their work with thorns 
and thistles. The prophetic collector used this old 
story to show that sin brings suffering. The picture 
of God here is not majestic and lofty. As usual in 
the oldest stories, God is like a man. He experi- 
ments with creation, he has to come down to earth to 
find out what is going on, he talks in a familiar way 
with man and takes pleasure in him when he is good 
and punishes him when he disobeys. 

The story of Cain and Abel in chapter 4 came also 
from the prophetic collection. It is a story of the 
beginnings of the common occupations and arts. 
Cain in a fit of anger slew his brother Abel and fled 
to avoid the vengeance of his family and neighbors. 
He married a wife and founded a city, and among 
his descendants arose the arts of tent-making and of 
hammering brass and iron. The prophet collector 
used the story to show again how sin brings punish- 
ment. Cain, driven out for his sins, cries, " My 
punishment is greater than I can bear." 

Another old story told in the homes of Palestine 
was that of a flood. In Babylon the tale was woven 
into a poem and has come down to us in a form 
which has many likenesses to that of the Hebrews. 
An ark is built at the command of the gods, the 
Noah of the story takes into it his family and ani- 
mals; when the flood is over he sends out birds to 
find if there is any land yet free from water, and 
when the ark alights, he makes a sacrifice to the 
gods. 



210 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

" ' O man of Shurippak, son of Ubaratutu, 

Pull down thy house, build a ship, 

Leave thy possessions, take thought for thy life, 

Thy property abandon, save thy life, 

Bring living seed of every kind into the ship/ 

" Six days and nights 

Blew the wind, the deluge and the tempest overwhelmed 

the land. 
When the seventh day drew nigh, the tempest ceased; the 

deluge, 
Which had fought like an army, ended. 

To the land of Nisir the ship made its way, 

The mount of Nisir held it fast, that it moved not. 

When the seventh day approached 

I sent forth a dove and let her go. 

The dove flew to and fro, 

But there was no resting place and she returned. 

I sent forth a swallow and let her go, 

The swallow flew to and fro, 

But there was no resting place and she returned. 

I sent forth a raven and let her go, 

The raven flew away, she saw the abatement of the waters, 

She drew near, she waded, she croaked, and came not 

back. 
Then I sent everything forth to the four quarters of 
heaven, 
I offered sacrifice, 
I made a libation upon the mountain's peak." x 

While the likenesses are so great that there is 
no doubt of the common origin of the stories, the 

1 From Rogers, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, New York, 
1908, p. 200 ff. 



STORIES OF THE BEGINNING 211 

Babylonian tale is entirely lacking in the religious 
value of the Biblical story. The Hebrew tale was 
used by both the prophetic and priestly collectors 
and the writer of Genesis has taken parts of each 
version and has kept the religious purpose of both. 

The world had grown corrupt. All the thoughts 
of man's heart were evil, till at last God was sorry 
that he had made man; then he brought the flood 
upon the world. Thus the prophetic story teller 
teaches his familiar lesson that sin brings punish- 
ment. The priestly story teller makes the tale lead 
up to a little group of laws. Men may eat plants 
and the flesh of animals, but the blood was believed 
to be the seat of life and it must not be eaten, but 
poured out so that the life could go back to God. 
He who killed a man must pay for his crime with 
his own life. This little group of laws is the first 
of the codes which the priestly writer wove into the 
collection of tales. 

One might expect that the priestly writer would 
lay great stress on the sacrifice which the old story 
said Noah made after the flood, but he does not men- 
tion it. The laws of sacrifice were, so he thought, re- 
vealed by God to Moses, and he dropped sacrifices 
out of all the older stories in which they occurred. 
This makes one curious difference in the two versions 
of the story. The prophetic writer, telling of a 
sacrifice, must provide animals for it, and so Noah 
takes into the ark seven each of the clean animals, 
that is, those used for sacrifice; the priestly writer 
has no need of this and says that Noah took in two 
each of all animals. It is easy, however, to go back 



212 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

of all such differences to the tale as it was told in 
the hills of Palestine. 

The Hebrews were a small people crowded in be- 
tween other peoples, some closely related and some 
of different customs, lineage and language. Travel- 
ing merchants from the distant lands of Egypt and 
Babylon brought them news of still other races, while 
reports of countries and peoples across the sea came 
from the traders of Tyre and Sidon, who brought 
goods and sailors' tales from Greece and Italy and 
Carthage and far-off Spain. One of the questions 
the children were sure to ask and the older people to 
try to answer was, " Why are there so many peoples 
in the world? n The collectors of stories have pre- 
served some of the answers. One kind of answer 
is in chapter 10. It is a table of nations, not all 
from one source. After the ancient eastern fashion, 
it was put in the form of family history, like the He- 
brew stories of their own origin from Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob. 

In the account of the flood it was said that Noah 
had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. These, 
then, must have been the ancestors of all the nations. 
From Japheth came the distant tribes, such as the 
Greeks (Javan, that is, Ionia) and the Medes 
(Madai) over the mountains beyond Assyria, and 
the other far-off peoples of which the Hebrews had 
barely heard the names. From Ham came some of 
the peoples whom they knew better — the Egyptians 
(Mizraim) and the tribes of southern Arabia (Seba 
and Havilah), Babylon (Babel) and Assyria 
(Asshur) and the old inhabitants of Palestine 



STORIES OF THE BEGINNING 213 

(Canaan). From Shem came the Hebrews and 
nations whom they regarded as kin — the people of 
Elam beyond Babylonia, of Mesopotamia (Aram), 
of Assyria ( Asshur, also said to be from Ham) and 
the tribes of northern Arabia (Joktan and his de- 
scendants) . So they classified the nations which they 
knew and accounted for their origin and relation- 
ships. Of course the classification was not scientific; 
we should not expect that in ancient stories. The 
Canaanites, for example, were much more closely 
akin to the Hebrews than were the Elamites. 

Sometimes the children put the question a little 
differently and asked where the different languages 
came from and why all people did not speak the same 
tongue. An old Babylonian tale, the story of Babel, 
was used to answer this question. 

Once upon a time all the world talked the same 
language and all lived together as one people; and 
they all moved down to the plain of Shinar, which is 
a part of Babylonia. The plain was so fertile that 
they decided to wander no more. They built a city 
and, growing proud of their power, started to build 
a great tower so high that it would reach to heaven. 

Then God came down to see what the race of men 
were doing, and he was jealous of the power which 
they showed. He said to the members of his court 
in heaven, " The people are one and they all speak 
one language and they will be able to do anything 
they want. Let us go down and confuse their 
language so they will speak different tongues and be 
unable to understand each other. Then they must 
scatter and lose their power and their pride. " God 



2i 4 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

did this; then they stopped building the city and the 
tower and were scattered over all the earth. That 
is how different peoples and different languages 
arose. 

The story was first told in Babylon to account for 
some ruined tower, such as the Babylonians built at 
their temples, whose origin was so ancient that it had 
been forgotten. It was used by the Hebrews to 
account for the name Babylon (Babel), which in its 
own language meant " The Gate of God. M To 
the Hebrew the name suggested the word babel, 
which meant to confuse, and so they said it was the 
place where God confused the languages. The tale 
came into the Bible from the collection of the pro- 
phetic writer. He had used it to teach his favorite 
lesson that sin brings punishment. 

We shall not look to these old stories for the real 
history of the origin of the human race, of nations 
and of languages. The value of these Hebrew 
stories of the beginnings lies not in any science or 
history which they give, but in their vivid and 
picturesque story telling, in their conception of the 
relation of God to man and the world, and in the 
idea that suffering comes to guilty and innocent alike 
when men do wrong. 

Genesis 1:1-2:4, The story of Creation. Genesis 
2:4-4:26, Eden, and the beginnings of society. Genesis 
6-9, The tradition of the flood. Genesis 11:1-11, The 
tower of Babel. 



CHAPTER XXX 

A REVIEW 

General Divisions 

The period covered in this book may be divided 
into three parts: I. Abraham to Joseph; II. Moses 
and Joshua; III. The Judges. The first part car- 
ries the Hebrews from Ur through Palestine to 
Egypt; the second, from Egypt through northern 
Arabia back to Palestine ; and the third tells of the 
formation of the nation in Palestine. 

The Great Characters 

Try to picture the life and character of each of 
the men studied. Recall the main events in the life 
of each. Abraham was a great adventurer, a 
pioneer who migrated from Ur into a new land. 
There he pastured his flocks on the hills near 
Shechem, then was driven by the pressure of the 
population into the less fertile hills in the south. 
Remember the story of his great test, when he 
showed himself willing to give up his only son if 
God asked it. Recall how, when their flocks grew 
too large to be pastured together, he offered his 
nephew Lot the choice of the best land, and how 
later he pled with God to save the evil towns of the 
Plain. Think what his life shows as to his charac- 
ter — strong, faithful, generous, large hearted. 

215 



216 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

Isaac was a less heroic character. He spent all 
his years in the region of Hebron and Beersheba, on 
the southern border of Palestine. The stories told 
of him made him far less impressive to the imagin- 
ation of Israel than was his rugged father, Abraham. 
There was, however, a charm about his quiet, peace- 
loving life. 

Jacob tried to be clever and over-reached himself. 
Recall the main events in the story of his life — his 
trick to out-wit his brother Esau, his flight because of 
this to distant Mesopotamia, his life there with its 
love and toil and trouble, his return to Palestine, 
the quarrels among his sons, the long years of sor- 
row over the loss of Joseph, and at last his journey 
to Egypt and his old age in that land where Joseph 
was premier. Recall how the tales show a cunning, 
clever schemer, always trying to get the better of 
others and always finding that his selfish scheming 
brought trouble on himself. Remember how life 
disciplined him till he became less selfish in his old 
age. His character was one of mingled good and 
evil, but with an energy and nobility which made 
stories of him very popular in Israel, as we may see 
by the fullness with w T hich they are told. 

Joseph, the viceroy of Egypt, brings the romance 
of courtly splendor into these shepherds' tales. Re- 
view the events of the story — the pampered and 
selfish boy in his father's camp, his sale as a slave, 
the new life in Egypt, the trust he won from his 
master, his imprisonment and romantic release, the 
efficient management of famine relief which made 
him viceroy, and at last his unexpected reunion with 



A REVIEW 217 

his own family, whom prosperity had not driven 
from his affection. It is a characteristic romantic 
tale of the East, with the sudden shifts of scene and 
fortune which oriental story tellers have always 
loved, and it is also a picture of one of the finest 
characters in all the stories of the world. 

Moses, the deliverer, presents another tale of con- 
trasts. The slave baby, the foster son of a princess, 
the fugitive shepherd in Arabia, the champion of He- 
brew serfs in the court where he had been reared, 
the leader of a fickle, undisciplined mob in the half- 
desert wilderness, the great organizer who by sheer 
force of personality molded this mob into some sem- 
blance of a nation till at last the people were strong 
enough to win pasture lands and villages in the fer- 
tile country east of the Jordan, the aged man who 
died alone on a mountain top whither God had called 
him to look at the western hills he was never to 
enter — the story was one of absolute faithfulness 
to ideals, of long, patient labor and of triumph at 
last. Moses was a practical idealist. He was a 
great administrator. He was a lawgiver; the origin 
of Hebrew law, as far as it was anything more than 
the traditional customs of shepherd tribes, was due 
to this great leader. He organized the worship of 
Jehovah and made loyalty to this God the rallying- 
point of Hebrew nationality. The Hebrews were 
quite right to consider him the great originator of 
their law and religion. 

Joshua the warrior is still a different type. Recall 
what the stories ascribe to him — the leadership of 
Israel after the death of Moses, the conquest of 



218 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

Jericho and Ai, then a treaty with the Gibeonites, 
and further conquests of tribes in southern Israel 
and in the northern part of the land. After that his 
activity as a leader ceased. The stories know noth- 
ing of him as a civil ruler. The late priestly tradi- 
tion told how he distributed the land to the tribes 
of Israel, but the earlier traditions imply that each 
tribe won its own territory as it was able. Joshua 
seems to have settled down in his tribe of Ephraim. 
The only great event which tradition told of his later 
life was that, in his old age, he twice gathered repre- 
sentatives of the people and pledged the nation to 
the continued worship of Jehovah. 

Some of the lesser Judges, Othniel and Ehud, are 
obscurely pictured, while others, Shamgar, Ibzan, 
Elon and Abdon, are little more than names, but the 
greater Judges were the subjects of very clear and 
vivid narratives. 

Deborah, the woman warrior, inspired the nation 
to meet the growing power of the old Canaanite in- 
habitants. Recall the ringing war ballad which cel- 
ebrated the victory over Sisera. Gideon broke the 
power of raiders from the eastern desert. Recall 
the stories which gathered about the memory of the 
gallant fight he made with his little band against the 
horde of Arab invaders. During this period the 
lack of unity was the great danger of the people. 
They began to see it, and Abimelech, the half- 
Canaanite son of Gideon, attempted to form a mili- 
tary despotism in which Canaanite and Hebrew 
should unite. The time was not ripe, the two races 
could not mix, and Abimelech was not the man, 



A REVIEW 219 

either in character or in ability, to found a kingdom. 
Jephthah, the outlaw of Gilead, became the leader 
of the Hebrews east of the Jordan in a crisis much 
like that of the time of Deborah. The tribe of 
Ammon, who had formerly held land east of the 
Jordan and been dispossessed by the Amorites whom 
the Hebrews had conquered, were now ready to try 
to win back the land of their fathers. Jephthah de- 
feated them, but we recall how his victory was turned 
into mourning by the sad chance which made his only 
child the victim of his vow. Before the close of this 
period another race of invaders, the Philistines, 
had appeared in Palestine and the stories of Samson 
reflect the strained relation on the southwestern 
border between Philistines and Hebrews. Samson 
was not, like the other judges, a man of nobility. 
He comes near to being a buffoon. He was never, 
so far as the tales shows, a Judge, though the editor 
of the stories numbers him among the Judges. 
Whatever heroism was in his story shows itself at 
the close of his career when, blind and a prisoner, 
he gave his life for vengeance. It is heroism of a 
primitive, savage sort, but it at least shows a man 
who sets something, if it be only revenge, at a higher 
value than his own life. 

What a varied collection of pictures ! How many 
types of character ! The stories give us tragedy and 
humor, nobility and baseness. They picture char- 
acters which command our honor and others which 
compel contempt, and still others where good and evil 
are mingled. In all of them, however, the ancient 
story tellers showed that sin brought suffering and 



220 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

that God was guiding the purposes of men to the 
fulfillment of his own will. 

The End of the Era 

What was the situation of the people at the end 
of the period? 

I. They had won their place in the land. The 
old inhabitants were still there, but no longer fought 
against them. Partly by conquest, partly by treaties 
of alliance, partly by intermarriage and social har- 
mony, the races were reaching a unity, though as 
yet an imperfect unity. 

II. They had borrowed largely from the earlier 
people. They came into Palestine a race of rude 
shepherds. The Canaanites possessed a higher cul- 
ture, built better homes, had better methods of agri- 
culture. They had horses and chariots of war while 
the Hebrews fought on foot. The Hebrews bor- 
rowed also the Canaanite agricultural feasts at seed 
time and at the beginning and the end of harvest. 
These became the great feasts of the religion of 
Jehovah. The Hebrews borrowed the sacred places 
of the Canaanites, worshiping Jehovah where the 
old inhabitants still worshiped their local gods, the 
Baals. Naturally they not only borrowed some of 
the forms of worship but also worshiped the Baals. 

III. The lack of national unity was the great 
political danger of the Hebrews. It went so far 
in the time of the Judges that some tribes refused to 
aid others against an oppressor. Judah and Simeon 
in the South were not even expected to act with the 
tribes of the North. Occasionally the tribes were at 



A REVIEW 221 

war between themselves. Like the Balkan states, 
their lack of unity was a danger to themselves and 
a menace to the peoples about. Before the period 
of the Judges was far advanced some of the people 
saw the danger, and Abimelech tried to turn it to 
his purposes. Before the end of the period the pres- 
sure of the Philistines drove the people to unite. 
The next great period of history was the formation 
of a Hebrew kingdom. The Judges prepared the 
way for the Kings. A settled nation needs a strong 
government. 

Dates of the History 

In telling their traditions the early Hebrews cared 
nothing about the dates of the history. The later 
writers of the Bible inserted a scheme of dates, but 
it is artificial and somewhat obscure. The close of 
the period of the Judges is usually put at about 
1050 B. c, a little earlier than the traditional date 
of Homer in Greece. The period of the Judges may 
have extended over one or two centuries. The dates 
of the earlier events have been the subject of much 
discussion. Perhaps the Hebrews left Egypt about 
1200 B. c. Dates of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are 
impossible to assign. 

The Permanent Value of the Traditions 

The exact amount of history lying behind these 
traditions is in some cases uncertain. The traditions 
of the Judges tell of real characters, probably some- 
times with considerable exactness. The Song of 
Deborah seems to be an almost contemporary poem. 



222 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

Joshua and Moses were great leaders, in no wise 
to be discounted because a grateful memory may 
have enlarged the work they did. The stories of 
Jacob and Abraham may contain, along with tradi- 
tions of great leaders, the memories of journeys 
and wars of the Hebrew tribes. 

We study the old stories of Israel not because they 
tell us in every case exactly what took place in the 
infancy and childhood of the nation, but because they 
contain splendid story telling, give us in pictorial 
form the best ideals of the highest religion in the 
ancient world, and are an important part of the 
basis of our own English and American life. 



BOOK LIST 

The following list is not exhaustive, but contains 
the names of certain untechnical books, some of 
which are written to meet the needs of young people. 

I. Geography 

George Adam Smith. Historical Geography of the Holy 
Land. Two volumes. First edition, 1894. A great work, 
comprehensive, vivid, with excellent maps. 

C. F. Kent. Biblical Geography and History. New 
York, 191 1. An excellent manual. 

L. H. Wild. Geographical Influences in Old Testament 
Master-pieces. Boston, n. d. The relation of geography to 
the literature of the Bible. 

II. Texts of the Bible 

C. F. Kent. The Historical Bible. New York, 1908. 
Volumes I and II deal with early Israel to Solomon. 

The Bible for Home and School. New York. Small 
commentaries of separate books, giving modern scholarship 
in simple form. 

The Century Bible. Edinburgh, New York. Another 
series of small and excellent commentaries. 

N. M. Hall. Tales of Far-Off Days. Tales of Cap- 
tains and Conquests. Boston, 1920. Two volumes, giv- 
ing the story of Israel to the end of the reign of Solomon, 
with its connections in English literature. 

III. History 

F. K. Sanders. History of the Hebrews. New York, 
1 9 14. A comprehensive outline, arranged for class use. 

223 



224 THE HEROES OF EARLY ISRAEL 

George Hodges. Classbook of Old Testament History. 

1913. Designed for young people; brief and interesting. 
L. H. Wild. The Evolution of the Hebrew People. 

New York, 191 7. A broad introduction to Biblical history, 
geography and literature. 

H. P. Smith. Old Testament History. New York, 
1903. A larger and more detailed work with interesting 
descriptions of early Israel in chapters IV to VI. 

IV. The Literature of the Bible 

George Hodges. How to Know the Bible. Indianapolis, 
191 8. The growth of the Bible simply and skillfully told. 

G. F. Genung. A Guidebook to the Bible. Boston, 1919. 
The growth of Hebrew Literature as the expression of its 
life. 

Wood and Grant. The Bible as Literature. New York, 

1 914. Brief introduction to the biblical books. 

G. F. Moore. The Literature of the Old Testament. 
New York, 191 3. A skillful introduction, containing much 
information in a brief space. 

H. T. Fowler. A History of the Literature of Ancient 
Israel. New York, 19 12. A careful and scholarly history 
of the growth of the Old Testament, excellent for teachers. 



INDEX 



Aaron, 86 ff, 107, 124, 135. 
Abimelech, Philistine chief, 20, 
27, 36 f. 

Son of Gideon, ch. xxvii, 221. 
Abiram, 131. 

Abraham, ch. ii-iv, 215, 222. 
Adam, 208 f. 

a place, 151. 
Ai, 156 ff. 
Ajalon, 161. 
Amalakites, 123, 126, 130, 134 f, 

150. 
Ammonites, 197 ff, 219. 
Amorites, 137, 141, 150, 219. 
Arabah, 6. 
Arabia, 27, 32, 82 f. 
Ark of covenant, 120, 125, 151. 
Arnon, 136 ff, 141. 
Asher, 165, 189. 

Baalam, 138 ff, 140. 

Baals, 115, 220. 

Babel, 214. 

Babylon, 7, 11 ff. 

Babylonia, 12 ff, 73, no, 213 f. 

Babylonian story of flood, 209 ff. 

Balak, 138 ff. 

Barak, 180 ff, 184. 

Bashan, 6 f, 143 f. 

Beersheba, 18, 27, 31, 36, 126. 

Benjamin, 38, 63, 66 ff, 164, 178. 

Bethel, 4, 8, 18 f, 20 f, 42 f, 156, 

175- 
Beth-horon, 160. 
Bethlehem, 4. 
Bethuel, 34. 

225 



Canaan, ch. i. 

Canaanites, 150, 159, 161, 164, 

170 ff, 1 80 ff, 212 f, 220. 
Carmel, 3. 
Covenant with Abraham, 25 ff. 

with Israel, ch. xvi. 
Creation, story of, 207 ff. 

Dagon, 206. 

Damascus, 7, 8. 

Dan, 21, 164, ch. xxiv, 200. 

Dates of Egyptian history, 74. 

of early Hebrew history, 221. 
Dathan, 131. 
Dead Sea, 4 ff , 23, 133 ff. 
Deborah, 180 ff, 184, 218, 221. 
Delilah, 205 ff. 
Deuteronomy, 12, 102. 
Dothan, 52. 

Edom, 134, 136, 140. 

Eglon, 178 f. 

Egyp' ; 7> ,*9*> ,53i 54 #> ch. xi, 

chs. xii, xiii, 150. 
Ehud, 179 ff, 218. 
Elam, 21. 
Elath, 8, 21, 134. 
Eliezer, 32 ff. 
Elim, 103. 

Ephraim, 38, 148, 164, 199. 
Esau, 39 ff, 47 f. 
Eschol, 128. 
Esdraelon, Plain of, 4, 6 f , 16, 

52, 148, 181 ff, 185, 188 ff. 
Etham, 95. 
Euphrates, 12 ff. 



226 



INDEX 



Flood, story of, 209 ff. 

Gaal, 196. 
Gad, 149, 165. 
Galeed, 47. 
Galilee, 3, 161. 

Sea of, 5 f. 
Gaza, 204. 
Gerar, 31, 32. 
Gibeon, 159 f. 

Gideon, ch. xxvi, 193 f, 218. 
Gilead, 6 ff, 143 if, 149 ff, 197 ff. 
Gilgal, 152, 158. 
Goshen, 69, 77, 79, 90 f. 

Hagar, 26 f. 

Haran, 12 ff, 28, 44. 

Hebron, 4, 8, 9 f, 25, 27, 29, 31 f, 

69, 126, 127 ff, 160, 205. 
Heliopolis. See On. 
Hermon, Mount, 6, 172, 174. 
Heshbon, 143. 
Hobah, 18. 

Horeb, 108. See Sinai. 
Huleh, Lake of, 5, 161. 

Ikhnaton, 76. 

Isaac, 20, 26 ff, ch. v, 38 ff, 216. 

Ishmael, 26 f. 

Ishmaelites, 53. 

Israel, 48. See Jacob. 

Issachar, 38, 164. 

Jabbok, 48, 137, 141 ff. 

Jacob, ch. vi-x, 216, 222. 

Jael, 183. 

Jehovah, origin of name, 86. 

Jephthah, 198 ff, 218. 

Jericho, 3 ff, 150 f, 152 ff, 155. 

Jerusalem, 3 ff, 7 f , 29, 156, 160, 

169. 
Jethro, 113 f. 
Jezreel, 188. 



Joppa, 7. 

Jordan, 2 f , 4 ff , 151 ff, 190 f. 

valley of, 4 ff, 21 f, 46, 153 ff. 
Joseph, 38, ch. viii-x, 216. 
Joshua, 123, 145, ch. xxi-xxiii, 

216 f, 222. 
Jotham, 194 ff. 
Judah, 38, 149, 164, 204, 220. 
Judges, character of authority, 
177. 

dates of, 221. 
Judges, Book of, 177 f, 184. 

Kadesh, 102, ch. xviii, 133, 136. 
Kenites, 115, 183. 
Kishon, 181 ff. 

Laban, 41, 44 ff. 
Laish, 174 f. 
Leah, 45 f . 
Lebanon, 4, 15. 
Levi, 38, 165. 
Levite, 172 f. 
Lot, 14, 16, 20 ff. 

Manna, 104, 121. 

Manassah, 38, 149, 165, 188. 

Megiddo, 181 f. 

Memphis, 73, 78. 

Merneptah, 75 f. 

Merom. See Huleh Lake. 

Meroz, 182. 

Mesopotamia, 12 ff, 33 f, 44 ff. 

Micah, 172 ff. 

Midian, 99, 101 ff. 

Midianites, 53 f, 83 f, 101, 114 f, 

129, 145, 185 ff. 
Miriam, 78 f, 98, 124. 
Mizpah, 47. 

Moab, 4, 6 f , 8, 134, 136 f, 142 f. 
Moabites, 178 ff. 
Moriah, 29. 
Moses, ch. xii-xx, 186, 216, 222. 



INDEX 



227 



Naphtali, 165, 189. 

Nazareth, 4, 164. 

Nebo, 146. 

Nile, 19, 58, 61 f, 71 ff, 88, 91. 

Noah, 211. 

Og, 143 f- 
On, 60. 
Oreb, 190. 
Othneil, 178, 218. 

Palestine, ch. i. 

Paran, wilderness of, 118, 126 f. 

Philistia, 1. 

Philistines, 3, 31 f, 173, 200 ff, 

219. 
Pisgah, 146. 
Pithom, 77, 93. 
Potiphar, 54 f . 



Sacrifice, human, 28 f. 

Samaria, 4. 

Samson, ch. xxviii, 219. 

Seir, Mount, 134 f. 

Seti I, 75 f, 80. 

Shechem, 4, 8, 16, 19, 25, 50, 52, 

164, 166 ff, 193 ff. 
Shinar, 21, 214. 
Sihon, 137, 142. 
Simeon, 38, 66, 164, 220. 
Sinai, ch. xv, xvi, no, 118. 
Sisera, 180 ff. 
Sodom, 22. 

Spies, in Hebron, 127 ff, 132, 150. 
in Jericho, 150 ff, 155. 

Tabor, Mount, 181 ff. 

Ten Commandments, noff. 

Timnath-Serah, 169. 



Rachel, 44 ff, 51 f. 

Ramses II, 75 ff, 79 f, 94. 

Rebecca, 34 ff, 40 ff. 

Red Sea, 8, ch. xiv. 

Rephidim, 123, 150. 

Reuben, 38, 53, 66 y 131, 149, 165. 



Ur, 12, 215. 

Zebul, 196. 
Zebulun, 38, 165, 18 
Zeeb, 190. 
Zidon, 174. 
Zin, 103. 



INDEX OF SCRIPTURE PASSAGES 



Genesis 1-4 214 

" 2:4 208 

" 6-9 214 

" ii : 1-11 214 

" 11 : 27-12: 9 16 

" 12: 10-20 20, 24 

" 13:1-13 24 

13:14-17 30 

" 14 : 1-24 24 

" 15:1-18 30 

" 17:1-8 30 

" 17: 1-21 26 

" 18:1-33 24 

" 19:1-28 24 

" 20:1-18 20 

" 21 : 1-21 3° 

" 22: 1-14 3° 

" 22: 15-19 3° 

" 24 37 

" 25 : 27-34 43 

" 26:6-11 20 

" 26:12-33 37 

" 27 : 1-41 43 

" 27 : 46-28 : 22 43 

" 29: 1-30 50 

" 3i:i-55 5o 

" 32, 33 5o 

" 35:28, 29 42 

" 37,38 56 

" 40, 41 62 

" 42:1-46:7 70 

" 47: 1-12 70 

" 50: 15-26 70 

Exodus 1 : 8-14 84 

2 84 

" 3:1-4:17 ••• 92 

" 4 : 27-6 : 1 92 

6:23 86 

" 7-1 1 92 

" 12:29-36 92 

" 12:37 99 

228 



Exodus 13:17-14:31 100 

" 14: 22 97 

" 15:1-18 98 

" 15: 1-21 100 

" 15:22-16:20 109 

" 18 117 

" 18:8 97 

" 19: 1-23 109 

" 20 in, 112, 117 

" 20: 18-21 109 

" 23: 19 in 

" 32: 1-34: 10 109 

" 33:7-n I2 5 

Numbers 10: 29-32 .... 114, 117 

" 10: 33-36 125 

" 11, 12 125 

13, 14 J 32 

" 16 132 

" 20:10-13 145 

" 20: 14-21 : 32 140 

" 21:33-35 144, J 47 

" 22-24 J 40 

32 149 

Joshua 1, 2, 3, 4 155 

5:13-6:27 155 

" 8: 30-35 169 

" 34,35 J69 

Judges 1 162 

" 2:6-3:6 177, 184 

" 3:7-9 184 

3:7-30 184 

" 4:i-3 184 

" 4,5 184 

6:1-6 184 

" 6, 7, 8 192 

" 9 198 

" 11 198 

" 13-16 206 

" 17, 18 176, 178 

" 19-21 178 

I Sam 4:1-11 125 



INDEX OF SCRIPTURE PASSAGES 229 

II Kings 18:1-4 135 Isaiah 4:8 25 

Psalms 105, 106, 136:10- I Corinthians 10:4 123 

22 140 James 2 : 23 25 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: June 2005 

PreservatinnTpnhnnlnnie 



